Thinking about, Engaging with, and Applying Data

When does a course not need to be…a course?

Sometimes, less is more. Especially when you can eliminate the overhead of a ~30 minute course in favor of a simple job aid that gets the same point across.

Background

As part of a data literacy initiative, the project manager (my manager) had scoped out two small courses for teaching employees the fundamentals of thinking about and applying data in day-to-day experiences. The first course, Learning to Speak Data, became a 10-15 minute Storyline 360 presentation with interactive content and a 4-question quiz. The second course—on learning to think about, engage with, and apply data more effectively—was more problematic.

After reviewing over the course requirements and parsing the source content, the idea of a full course felt…too much. The request was to produce content outlining actions that fell into each of the following three categories.

• Thinking – using data to understand problems and develop solutions.
• Engaging – developing confidence with data and leveraging that confidence to share data and insights with others.
• Applying – deriving and using insights from data to address problems and validate that solutions provide the intended benefit(s).

The problem is that the result felt like we were opening a firehose up to full-bast and slamming the learner with a bunch of content they needed to memorize. In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, the learning objectives were just too basic (they all fell into the Knowledge category), potentially resulting in a poor learning experience.

Implementation

After thinking about it a bit, I laid out the following prototype in PowerPoint, and met with the program manager. It wasn’t pretty—OK, it’s downright ugly—but it was effective enough to use as a visual while proposing the change of direction.

I proposed replacing the course with a more polished version of the job aid. Rather than releasing a second course, the program manager agreed to bundle the job aid with the preceding course, Learning to Speak Data. Angling all of the question types and questions around the central hub fixed the layout issue, and the final result came out pretty well for something done 100% in PowerPoint.