How to Shift from Innovation to ‘Practical Perfection’ in Curriculum Design
- Published on: December 12, 2024
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- Updated on: December 18, 2024
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- Reading Time: 8 mins
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Not long ago, workforce L&D leaders imagined a future where edtech aligned innovation with organizational goals. The promise was personalized, engaging, and impactful learning. It aimed to equip employees with skills that are future-ready while meeting operational demands. All this, at scale and with measurable outcomes.
However, the path to achieving this vision is far from straight or absent obstacles. The pace of technology, the diversity of learner needs, and organizational constraints pull L&D strategies in opposing directions or, worse, put them in conflict with one another. On one side, innovations that overlook real-world challenges risk becoming shiny but underutilized tools. On the other, overly pragmatic approaches can sacrifice the engagement and adaptability modern learners expect.
Striking the right balance between innovation and practicality is more than an L&D challenge—it’s a design necessity. When done effectively, this prepares employees for both today’s requirements and tomorrow’s opportunities.
The following are my top takeaways from my conversation with Sam Nelson, Director of Technical Curriculum at Multiverse. It highlights seven strategies L&D leaders can adopt to bridge the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical in curriculum design.
7 Ways to Bridge the Gap Between Innovation and Practical Curriculum Design
1. Get Everyone on the Same Page
Alignment is often where things fall apart. Before jumping into product design, platform developers, curriculum designers, and support teams need to align on the company’s strategic priorities, constraints, and potential trade-offs. Without a shared vision, efforts can quickly fragment and become siloed.
The first step is clarity: Are we building technology for its own sake, or are we designing learning experiences? EdTech companies may sell technology, but tech-enabled schools and organizations focus on learning. Their goal isn’t just implementing tools, but crafting cohesive learning products where platform capabilities, curriculum content, and learner support are all aligned. One cannot achieve it’s raison d’etre without the others. Leadership plays a key role in engendering this necessary cohesion.
Here’s how L&D leaders can help:
1. Define learning objectives clearly – L&D leaders must ensure all teams understand the end goals of the curriculum and how the platform and support structures should support those goals. Clear learning outcomes will guide design decisions across teams.
2. Product POD approach – POD stands for ‘product-oriented delivery’. It is a work methodology where cross-functional teams of business and technology experts work together as a single unit to oversee all aspects of development and maintenance. In edtech, the L&D should work alongside engineers, designers, learning designers, and coaches to ensure a shared understanding of the learning goals and how technology can support them. This helps break down traditional silos.
3. Value alignment – Leaders must value both curriculum and technology as essential attributes of the product. When teams feel their work is equally valued, they can collaborate more effectively and evade territorial disputes over resources.
4. Shared KPIs – The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be aligned across teams. When the success of the curriculum team is tied to the platform’s ability to support the curriculum, and vice versa, both teams are more likely to collaborate successfully.
5. Cross-disciplinary role understanding – This ensures roles like product managers and technical curriculum leads understand both the technical and learning aspects of the product. For example, a technical curriculum lead should know how to integrate learning science into platform features and how support structures influence the learning experience.
6. Incorporate learning science and design in product development – L&D leaders should ensure that product managers working on platform development incorporate learning science and design principles into their work. For example, when developing a new feature for group coaching, input from learning designers is crucial to ensure the feature is pedagogically sound.
7. Encourage open communication – Establish regular check-ins and open communication between teams to keep everyone on the same page regarding expectations, resources, and timelines.
8. Leverage industry expertise – If internal teams lack specific expertise (e.g., in cybersecurity or product management), L&D leaders should be open to bringing in external experts or deciding not to pursue areas that stretch the team too thin.
When everyone’s working toward the same big-picture goal, you’ll find the process runs a lot smoother.
2. Maintain Consistency
Learners thrive on consistency. Whether they’re accessing content on a desktop, or mobile device, or with live instructor support, the experience should feel unified. This consistency doesn’t just happen — it’s the result of deliberate effort and ongoing refinement. To make this happen, start with:
1. Clear learning objectives – Objectives are more than just a list of tasks. They serve as the foundation that keeps the core message intact across all delivery methods. Think of them as the blueprint of your curriculum, guiding every learning path, assessment, and activity.
2. A unified content strategy – Mismatched examples, outdated materials, or inconsistent styles can quickly cause learners to disengage. Use templates, centralized repositories, and regular content audits to ensure a cohesive experience.
3. Quality checks – Ensure the learning materials undergo thorough regular testing.
By focusing on these elements, learners can concentrate on acquiring skills instead of navigating distracting inconsistencies.
3. Tailor Learning to Different Teams
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it in a diverse organization. The curriculum that works for one department might fall flat in another. That’s why tailoring programs to specific sectors is essential for ensuring they’re both relevant and impactful.
Here’s how to customize effectively:
1. Conduct needs assessments – Identify skills gaps and learning preferences by asking key questions like: What challenges are teams facing? What skills are needed? Where are the gaps hindering progress? The answers provide a roadmap for creating targeted solutions.
2. Build sector-specific pathways – Design learning journeys that include relevant case studies and real-world projects, ensuring alignment with each department’s needs.
3. Involve subject matter experts – Collaborate with experts to ensure content remains practical and grounded in real-world application.
This customization can mean the difference between a program that’s merely completed and one that’s genuinely effective.
4. Bring the Real World to the Curriculum
Let’s face it — no one remembers a slideshow full of abstract theories. What truly sticks are real-world scenarios and hands-on practice. Assignments that mirror workplace challenges make learning more relatable, offering a safe space to experiment, fail, and try again. These projects also give organizations a way to assess whether employees are ready to apply their skills in the real world.
Here’s how to make it work:
1. Focus on realistic, impactful projects – Replace generic quizzes with projects that reflect real workplace challenges. For instance, in data analysis, have learners clean messy, incomplete datasets and build predictive models. This is because these are the actual tasks they’ll face in their roles.
2. Facilitate learning transfer – Provide project briefs that help learners create deliverables their supervisors can use. This encourages both learning transfer and an immediate impact on the workplace.
3. Encourage reflection – Give learners opportunities to present and reflect on their projects, focusing on what they applied, what they learned, and areas for improvement.
The more relatable your content, the more likely learners are to apply it in their day-to-day roles.
5. Stay Ahead of Tech
Technology changes fast, and your curriculum should too. But staying agile doesn’t have to mean constant overhauls. Here’s a smart approach:
1. Integrate maintenance into your roadmap – Include regular content updates in your roadmap. This also means allocating resources to keep the curriculum relevant even when new projects take priority.
2. Balance new and existing content development – Update existing courses while developing new ones. For example, adding an AI module to a data analytics curriculum ensures the content stays current, and relevant while reinforcing foundational knowledge.
3. Track learning and career outcomes – Measure the impact of your curriculum with metrics like goal achievement and career outcomes (e.g., promotions, retention). These indicators help you determine when updates are needed.
The pace of technological change means today’s cutting-edge skills might be obsolete tomorrow. By making incremental updates, you can keep your curriculum relevant without overwhelming your team or learners.
6. Customize at Scale
Who doesn’t love a learning experience tailored just for them? The challenge is doing this for hundreds (or thousands) of learners. Scaling personalized learning requires smart technology, creative design, and a learner-first approach.
Here’s how to get it right:
1. Align with organizational goals – Tailor your program to meet the company’s objectives. For example, offer specialized learning paths for different roles, like data analysis, AI, or tools like Tableau vs. Excel.
2. Personalize for learners – Assess each learner’s skills and comfort level with a ‘skill scan’ to pinpoint what they already know and what they need to work on.
3. Project-based learning – Let learners select projects that align with their business unit, ensuring the learning is relevant and directly applicable to their work.
4. Cultural and regional sensitivity – Adapt content to respect cultural and regional differences, such as switching between US and UK English, and avoiding references that may not resonate across all audiences.
5. Ensure equitable access – Use clear, jargon-free language that is accessible to all learners, including those for whom English is not the first language, ensuring inclusivity.
This approach ensures that personalized learning remains scalable, effective, and accessible.
7. Measure What Matters
Training is an investment that, like any other, must deliver measurable results. However, measuring the ROI of learning programs goes beyond just numbers. It’s about telling a compelling story that connects learning efforts to tangible business outcomes. Hence leaders must start by setting clear success metrics:
- Skill Improvement – Use pre- and post-training assessments to track skill growth.
- Job Performance – Look at changes in employee performance, retention, and productivity.
- Engagement – Track completion rates and participation levels to gauge program engagement.
Then, back it up with learning analytics and impact assessments. Numbers don’t lie, and they’ll make your case for continued investment in L&D.
1. For example, in the case of learning outcomes:
- Track completion rates to show how well participants engage with the program
- Monitor assessment results to gauge how well learners are performing within the program.
2. For measuring career outcomes, leaders can:
- Measure the percentage of apprentices who stay with the company post-program
- Track how many apprentices get promoted or receive raises within a certain number of months after the program.
3. For business impact:
- Use case studies to show how other companies have benefited from the program, showcasing real-world impact.
To evaluate the overall return on investment, leaders can consider using tools like MAGE (Measure Applied, Generate, Evaluate), which tracks the impact of learning on both career growth and business performance.
This approach not only highlights the value of learning programs but also provides a clear, data-backed story that justifies continued investment in L&D.
So, as you design your next curriculum, ask yourself: Are we solving real problems? Are we equipping learners for today and tomorrow? Because when innovation meets practicality, the possibilities are endless.
Eric has an over 30-year career as a leader in academic publishing and edtech and has been consistently dedicated throughout that time to the acquisition, development, and release of content for student consumption at all grade levels (K-20) and across a wide range of disciplines. A throughline of Eric’s career has been his focus on putting achievement within reach of all students, with special consideration given to providing support for less proficient students and attending to the needs of those who are commonly disenfranchised.
FAQs
The optimal mix depends on your workforce dynamics and learning objectives. For technical skills, aim for 70% asynchronous content with 30% live sessions for practice and feedback. Consider factors like time zones, work schedules, and the complexity of skills being taught. Schedule synchronous sessions strategically for complex topics that benefit from real-time interaction and group discussion.
A comprehensive curriculum redesign typically takes 4-6 months for planning and implementation. Start with a pilot program in one department while maintaining existing training for others. Phase the rollout over 2-3 quarters, gathering feedback and making adjustments. Keep the old curriculum accessible until the new one is fully tested and implemented.
Implement spaced repetition checks at 30, 60, and 90 days post-training. Use micro-assessments embedded in daily work tasks to gauge practical application. Create opportunities for learners to teach concepts to others, as teaching reinforces learning. Track not just test scores but also the frequency and success of skill application in real work scenarios.
Set clear expectations upfront about the learning curve and temporary productivity dips. Share data from similar implementations showing the typical productivity curve. Create a stakeholder communication plan with weekly updates on progress and quick wins. Consider implementing changes during traditionally slower business periods and provide extra support during the transition phase.
Design your core curriculum with modular components allowing for different completion paths. Provide "stretch" projects for quick learners while offering additional support resources for those who need them. Create checkpoint assessments that enable learners to test out of familiar content while ensuring all achieve the same competency standards by the program's end.
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