Wireframing Tutorial
Wireframing is a crucial step in developing an instructionally-sound course. Do you approach course development this way?
In this edition, we'll delve a little deeper into building a wireframe and ways to prepare.
Planning your course
When you login to myUdutu and create a new course, you could easily just start adding screens to build the course. However, a bit of planning can go a long way! Ask yourself: "Do I know what learning outcomes I want to achieve?"
Whether you are an experienced instructional designer or someone who has never developed a course before, you can greatly benefit from creating an outline before building your course. One of the great things about myUdutu is that you can use empty pages and groups to quickly build an outline or, if you prefer, you can be more traditional and create a paper outline first. And while starting with a paper outline is certainly useful, another great benefit to building directly in myUdutu is that it allows you to use it as a collaborative workspace online where you can work with many designers, sharing your ideas on the structure in real time!
First come the basics...
The very first thing you should always do is define the overall training goal for the course. For example, we may want to create a course on building birdhouses. We would define our goal by stating “Upon completion of this course, you will have the necessary knowledge and skills to build a birdhouse.”
Once the goal is defined, you need to understand just who is the audience. Assessing who will be the learners ensures that the course designer takes the right approach and picks the appropriate starting point. For example, if you were designing a course on using a word processing application, you would need to include some computer basics if your target audience had little or no computer experience.
Consider how you would design the same course if your target audience consisted of graphic designers. You would then expect an audience with fairly strong computer skills and could skip the computer basics component when designing your course. Therefore, knowing the target audience is very useful when determining the steps needed to accomplish the overall training goal.
VCP Inventory
Let me introduce you to a very useful instructional design tool, the VCP Inventory. VCP stands for Vocabulary, Concepts, and Procedures. We can categorize everything we want to train into one or more of these buckets. You conduct a VCP Inventory to really understand the essential elements of the course.
The simplest way to build a VCP Inventory is to create a table like the one below.
Obviously, this list is only a sampling of what might be covered in a course on Building a Birdhouse but you get the idea. We want to capture as many of the things we want the course to convey as we can identify. The VCP Inventory is a great help in determining the learning objectives and then building the High Level Outline.
Wireframing = Outline
The easiest way to think of a wireframe is to equate it to an outline in traditional instructional design.
First, you determine the objectives of the course based on the course goal (use the VCP Inventory too!). Then create a high level outline showing the major topics the course should cover to meet the objectives. Finally, build a detailed outline to fill in the sub-topics, identify interactions and quizzes, and ensure the overall flow of the course progresses smoothly.
In myUdutu, create your course. In the Course Outline (the wireframe), add a group for each major section or topic listed in your outline. Next, add pages to each group. Try to select the best template for each page but don't stress too much about picking the right one. You can always change it later. The focus of wireframing should be to get your content flow and structure in place.
