Develop: Answering the Course Detail Questions

Why these four questions matter so much

Your source material tells Develop what the subject is. These questions tell it what to do with the subject: how deep to go, what language to use, which parts to spend time on, and what a finished learner should look like.

The useful way to think about it is that you are briefing a colleague who is about to build this training for you. You would not hand them a manual and say "make a course." You would tell them who it is for and what you need people to be able to do afterward. Same idea, same level of detail.

Your answers do a second job, too. You answer these questions before you add any source material, and if you use the web search in the next step, it searches based on what you write here. Clear answers get you better sources as well as a better course. More on that in Find Web Sources for Your Course.

The first two questions are required. The last two are optional, and answering them is one of the cheapest upgrades available to you. Each box shows a sample answer in grey to give you an idea of what to write.

1. Who is the audience?

Their role, their background, and how much they already know about this topic. Develop uses your answer to set the reading level, decide what it can assume people already understand, and choose the kinds of scenarios it builds. Vague in, vague out.

2. What should a learner be able to do on the job afterward?

This is the important one. Develop works backward from your answer to design the whole course, so notice the word "do." Knowing something and being able to do it produce very different courses, and only one of them shows up in someone's actual work.

If there is more than one outcome, list them all. Develop uses that list to work out how many modules the course needs, and the web search checks its sources against each one.

3. What do people get wrong, even after training? (optional)

This is where you hand over everything you have learned from watching people struggle with this topic. It tells Develop where to push harder. Stick to actual mistakes and misconceptions rather than frustration about attitude, because Develop can teach around a mistake but it cannot teach around "they do not care."

4. Any constraints or special instructions? (optional)

This is your steering wheel. Use it for anything Develop could not work out on its own:

• Format: "Build this as a roleplay where the learner plays the manager."
• Scope: "One module only," or "three modules, one per stage of the process."
• How to use your sources: "Teach from the process guide. Treat the other sources as background context only."
• Company context: anything about how your organization works that is not written down in your documents.

When you are ready

1. Click Continue to move on to step 3, Source Material, where you upload your own files, search the web for sources, or both.
2. On step 4, Review & Create, check the summary and click Create Course.

Develop builds the course in the background, usually in two to five minutes. You can close the tab and come back.

Changing your answers

Until you create the course, you can come back to these questions at any time. Click Edit on the Audience & Outcomes step, or click Edit next to the audience or outcome on the Review step.

If the course is not what you hoped for

Build a new one with better answers rather than patching the old one. Sharpening questions one and two usually produces a dramatically different result, and it only costs you a few minutes. Treat your first attempt as a draft and you will get where you want to go faster.