Page 119 - Making Instruction Work

chap 10 3/11/97 4:57 PM Page 105

10

Course Prerequisites

Situation: You have a clear picture of what students
should be able to do when they leave you (objectives) and
a picture (skill hierarchy) showing which skills must be
learned before others can be attempted. You also have a
good description of your target population.You can now
derive the point at which it would be most appropriate to
begin your course.

Here’s another neat way to save development time while
making sure that the finished course will do what you want it
to. Just as you were systematic about deciding where the course
should end, you want to be just as systematic about deciding
where it should begin. Do it by using the procedure described
in this chapter to answer the following questions:
Who will be qualified to enter my course? What, if anything,
will they need to be able to do before they can benefit from my
instruction? How can I select the least amount of content that
will take students from their current skill level to mastery of
the objectives?
Obviously, the fewer the restrictions on the entering stu-
dent, the larger the number of people who will qualify for your
course (and the more likely it will be that students will differ