Evocca - Course Creation

Goal

This project is one of many that I undertook when I was working for Evocca as a course writer. The goal of show casing this is to indicate the skill set that I used to research a subject and create course material that would be used for distance and class room based learning.

Research

After being assigned to create specific courses the team collaborated on a time line. The overall goal was to write a diploma course within 6 months; as with any large project courses were split to those with skills in the area and a time line was created for a month per subject.

The courses were defined by the government at training.gov.au from there the assessment requirements and implementation guidelines were accessed. Once this was done, a rough overview of what was required was created and then turned into a content assessment tracker (CAT) document. The CAT was the outline used to create a learning guide and marking guide with additional resources being created as required. Additional resources were dependent on the subject material, we had courses which required the creation of Virtual Machines to fully implement the required learning and others that were theory based.

After the inital research was done, the course entered the planning phase.

Planning

With the research initiated, the planning out of the course creation was started. With a time frame of 4 weeks, the basic timeframe was:

• Week 1
• • Initial Course requirements gathered
  • CAT created
  • Assessment items determined and researched
  • Assessment items prototyped
  • Marking guide layout created
  • Learning guide layout created
• Week 2
• • Marking guide written
  • Assessment items for marking guide created, tested and written
  • Tutors resources for marking guide written
  • Additional resources created
• Week 3
• • Learning guide written
  • Formative assessments written
  • Testing of formative assessments
  • Additional resources created
• Week 4
• • Learning guide finalised
  • Formative assessments finalised
  • Testing of formative assessments
  • Marking guide finalised
  • Additional resources finalised
  • Completion of documents and resources
  • Send completed package to Editing team

Once this was completed the generalised timeline was used for the next unit to be created.

Visual Design

Layout was set by the editing team, it was a simple outline layout. Graphics used within the documentation were created as needed with icons used for specific parts organised by the editing team. As such, when tips, tricks and examples were used, it was generally a box with a pre-selected icon used.

As a way to improve efficiency when creating documents, I created template documents to assiste with the layout of documents. As seen below.

Marking Guide Template

Learning Guide Template

Development & Testing

Development of the documents were completed in sequential order as the information created in the marking guide fed into the knowledge required to be added to the learning guide. As long as the assessment items were solid and matched the governments requirements, which was cross referenced in the CAT, then the unit was organised well.

Through the creation of the marking guide additional resource were created as needed. Each assessment item was written and tested to ensure that they were working in conjunction with the CAT.

For complex units, assessment items were created and handed over to another writer on the team to run through to ensure that the criteria was meet. This allowed for issues to be corrected and a different point of view to critically examine the core component of the course.

Once the course and materials had been written and completed, they were sent to the editing team for review and publishing.

Example

Below are examples of the documents from training.gov.au

Assessment requirements for ICTPRG507

Implementation Guidelines

Once these documents had been downloaded they were cross referenced into the CAT document. This document was then used to create a completed Marking Guide and Learning Guide.

Below is the CAT, Marking Guide and Learning Guide for ICTNWK511

Course Assessment Tracking (CAT)

Marking Guide for ICTNWK511

Learning Guide for ICTNWK511

Please note that the documents are normally word documents not PDF, the CAT is an excel spreadsheet. These documents have been converted to PDFs to enable ease of viewing for the portfolio.