Lack of foresight, poor planning, capitulation to union demands— in short, bad management—got the American automobile companies where they are today. Those who say the industry's problems are mostly the fault of the Government and other external forces need only to look at Japan to find an excellent illustration of how an industry can control its destiny.
James J. Unland
Investment Banker
As you have studied in Lesson 2, planning includes long-range, medium-range and operational (one-year) plans.
One of the critical subplans of the operational plan is something called a course development plan (CDP). Like a cash budget or the sales forecast, the CDP lists objectives, time frames for actions, and who will do what by when.
A CDP, like a budget, is a course developer's blueprint or guide to action. It tells the education director and his course developers the step-by-step sequence to follow in developing a new correspondence course.
In this lesson, you will learn how to prepare a workable course development plan: where do new course ideas come from? How do you control lesson writing quality?
When the overall strategy of your school calls for an expanded product mix—adding new courses—you can employ the ideas in this lesson to help guide the course development process from concept through on-shelf availability.
Overview of the Course Development Process: Two Models
No doubt every school has adopted its own special procedures and techniques for developing courses. No one plan could possibly fill all the needs for every school.
Let's take a broad view of how courses are put together first. Later in the lesson we will focus on the individual steps needed.
School A—Market Sensitive
Here is how one major school develops vocational courses for people seeking entry level training in a technical subject. Note the heavy influence of the marketplace on the course development scheme.
- Determine the need for home study training in a particular area, and propose a course for that area by reviewing government and industry forecasts, visits to industry and market surveys.
- Determine the media available for marketing the proposed course.
- Gather as much information on the subject as possible, including textbooks,research reports, periodicals, and formulate a list of possible authors and experts in the field.
- Develop a broad course outline, including basic objectives of the proposed course, approximate number of lessons and training kits, approximate cost of materials, editorial costs, and estimated tuition. Check outline with selected industry sources and established teachers and consultants.
- From the above, develop a marketing strategy and estimate total number of enrollments and expected revenue to determine if development of the proposed course is justified. If not, stop with this step.
- Develop a comprehensive course outline to include synopsis of each lesson and each training kit, including a list of all parts or equipment needed. Check outlines and kit contents with professionals in field.
- Secure writers for each of the lessons and kits.
- Prepare a development schedule for all lessons and kits.
School B—Provider Dictated Model
The Provider Dictated Model scheme below is typical of employer training programs or of military training. It is the employer who determines what training is needed, and the employer who designs courses. The course is often low tuition or tuition free to students, and is used to increase on-the-job competence.
- Analyze the training requirements for the organization. What needs to be taught? Select the course which fits training needs of the target population.
- Select subject to be taught and conduct job task analysis—identify all of the important elements of a job through observation, research, interviewing, etc.
- Refine job task selection and develop performance objectives for them. Objectives should list the expected educational outcomes, conditions under which students should be able to perform, and the level of performance (accuracy) expected.
- Create evaluation tools (exams, tests, projects) which measure the student's achievement of the objectives.
- Develop written instructional materials and sequence to teach the objectives.
- Validate and field test course on sample of students. Refine and adjust course after analyzing feedback.
- Offer the course to the students.
Both models borrow from each other and both can be used interchangeably. The key difference is that the model used by School A is sensitive to the market acceptance of the course. Results are always outside of the school. Will students enroll?
Course Development, Step-by-Step
For the purposes of this lesson let us adopt School A's model, the market sensitive approach to course planning. Let us also assume we are planning a vocational home study program in a technical topic such as Electronics, Computers, and Auto Mechanics.
Our goal here is to outline, briefly, a number of suggestions on course development you may wish to consider.
The step-by-step process used by most schools to develop courses is shown in Figure 12. This flow chart will be explained in more detail below. While the flow chart's steps may vary from school to school, the general march from research to shelf is largely common to all schools.
Another more elaborate flowchart illustrating the course development process may be found in the Planner's Toolkit following this lesson. (Both flow charts contain unique steps.) You will want to develop a flow chart for your own school as a guiding document.
Step 1 Research Market for New Course Ideas
An indispensable first step, you will want to have a person or department in your school who is continually researching the marketplace. The chief questions to be researched: "What new course(s) should we be offering? How should current courses be modified to meet emerging needs?"
Where do ideas for new home study courses come from? Here are a few sources your staff will want to monitor continuously for course possibilities:
- Business associations (e.g., Chamber of Commerce).
- Training directors of large companies.
- Requests from prospective and graduate students.
- Results of surveys—industrial, graduate, etc.
- Brainstorming sessions with your staff.
- Occupational Outlook Handbook (from the Department of Labor).
- New products or services being introduced in business and industry; trade shows; products featured in special interest media (e.g., Mechanix Illustrated).
- Observations—gut feelings.
- New training trends in professional societies and training media (e.g., Training Magazine); reports from American Society for
- Training and Development.
- Competitor's new courses.
- University and trade school enrollment trends.
- Ideas for courses suggested by sales representatives, particularly industry sales representatives.
Step 2 Research the Competition
This step deserves special mention. Successful courses are often not only distinctive, but usually unique. By evaluating what your competitors in both home study and resident schools are doing, you can better assess the market potential of a new course. You can easily scout the home study competition by sending off for course information or enrolling in a course.
A home study educator from West Germany, Axel Anderson, actually travels to the U.S. to spend a few days at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He is able to evaluate dozens of home study courses on file there, without leaving the library!
You might review college catalogs, read the latest "future" books coming out, study publishing house promotional literature—in short, look around. The ASTD's report, The Learning Enterprise(1989), is filled with suggestions for course ideas. Call ASTD at (703) 683-8100 to obtain a copy.
Can you offer a better course? Where is the competition weak? Course contents? Marketing? What weaknesses can you capitalize on? What history of success has your competitor enjoyed?
Step 3 Do Test Marketing and Select the Course
Earlier in this course you read that marketing tests and surveys can be misleading. However, you shouldn't ignore these tools completely.
Most schools select a course after having researched the market. Some schools actually do marketing surveys, run test ads, etc., to determine potential demand. Several questions on course potential come to mind:
- Is the course within your school's area of expertise? Is it compatible with current courses?
- What does a capital budgeting analysis—using the present value formula—indicate your potential return will be?
- What kind of course hardware or kits are needed?
- Can the course capture an acceptable number of enrollments?
- Can the course be developed by using current staff?
- Will more staff have to be added to service the course?
- Can the course compete with other schools, texts, etc.?
When satisfactory answers are given to questions like these, it's time to select the course which best fits your needs. Lesson 3 lists seven considerations you'll want to think about before deciding on a course. Once you have a number of courses identified, you can screen them for feasibility by using the New Course Idea Screening Chart described in the Planner's Toolkit following Lesson 3.
Step 4 Prepare Course Objectives
Good behavioral objectives are helpful in planning any course. Good objectives lead to streamlined courses, relevant tests and real world instruction. Military home study educators are pioneering in job-task analysis, a technique of breaking every job into subtasks. More on learning objectives follows in Lesson 5.
Step 5 Outline Course Program of Instruction(POI)
A course POI outline consists of, as a minimum, a title, a statement of scope and coverage, overall course objectives, lesson titles, lesson objectives, and test/exam format.
The Planner's Toolkit following this lesson illustrates a course POI for a course in juggling.
Step 6 Prepare a Course Budget
A critical step which can obviously come as Step 1 or 2 is course budgeting. In a course budget you will want to be sure in include both direct and indirect costs. In the Planner's Toolkit for Lesson 2 you saw a typical chart of accounts for typical and indirect costs. In the Planner's Toolkit for Lesson 2 you saw a typical chart of accounts for a home study course development project and a typical school expense budget.
An electronics school official has advised: "A typical new lesson will be about 50 pages in length. By the time we go through the steps of authoring, technical proofing, art, copy editing, typesetting, paste-up, final proofing, and printing we have approximately $5,000 tied up in that one lesson. One lesson from inception to printing will take from 14 to 16 weeks to complete."
What should a new course cost? Development costs today range from $5,000 to $500,000. One rule of thumb is that for each page of the finished, on-shelf product, you should budget no less than $100 to $150. This figure includes manuscript, editing, typography, art, photography and final printing.
The cost of lesson production varies. One education director advises that current per page costs (exclusive of plate making and printing) are:
| Writing of original manuscript | $40 per page |
| Wordprocessing (typesetting) | $10 per page |
| Paste-ups (mechanicals) | $15 per page |
| Stripping and negatives | $15 per page |
| Editing/illustrating | $30 per page |
| Artwork | $10 to $20 per page |
Kits and hardware merit special attention, and their instructional value to the course should be carefully weighed against their high cost, breakage, warehousing, shipping, reshipping, etc. A veteran home study educator tells us that to make a profit on a 'hardware' course, the actual costs of the kits/hardware must be multiplied by a factor of five and added to the tuition amount! In other words, adding a $10 standard text book means adding $50 to the tuition. A $5 kit means the tuition must be raised $25.
One major kit-using school reports that kit expenses consume 68% of the cost of the goods sold for their courses. Text lessons are only 11% of CGS!
If you prefer the hardware business, perhaps your best bet is to go into a mail order tool and parts supply house. Today, only 18 to 20% of all schools use kits.
As you study Figure 12 closely, recall that an established school has its fixed costs largely committed to current operations. New course proposals consume staff time and effort. Careful thought needs to be given to the personnel tasks required in a new course effort. If staff is devoted to keeping up with current enrollments, can they be freed to give proper time to a new course venture? Will new staff need to be added? Will current staff need to be retained?
Experience has taught home study educators that new course development costs are more controllable when in-house staff are used. Therefore, your course development plans should be carefully interwoven with the overall projected workload of the school's staff.
Step 7 Break the Project Down into Chunks
As you approach the task of preparing a new course, it is often helpful to divide the project into manageable "chunks" or discrete tasks.
Typical "chunks" of activities might include these areas:
- Research phase—available courses, texts, material.
- Course development team selection—artists, printers, etc.
- Objective writing—for each lesson (see POI in step 5 above).
- Text writing.
- Hardware and software for course servicing (i.e., computers and programs).
- Design and packaging.
- Prototype—a "model" lesson to show what final course will look like.
- Editing phase.
- Marketing plan—contracts, price, promotional literature, strategy. The school's marketing staff should be consulted early and often!
- Implementation phase—packaging, warehousing, mailing.
- Evaluation phase—survey forms, field testing with groups.
- Other identifiable tasks.
Of course, a number of other discrete tasks can be listed. The idea is to take an overview of the complete project, gather tasks into common groups, and assign individual staff to the task grouping.
Step 8 Schedule the Project
In this phase you will want to prepare a time line for project completion. A time chart can give you a helpful hand in giving an overview to when actions are to be done.
Another helpful device is a narrative, step-by-step guide to actions (see Planner's Toolkit after this lesson). The schedule gives everyone on the course development team milestones to reach.
The most common fault in scheduling courses is to underestimate the length of time it takes for people to complete their phase of the project.
One large school advises that for 50 pages of manuscript, it takes:
- 8 weeks to write.
- 1 week for a technical draft.
- 1 week for copy edit.
- 3 weeks for artwork.
- 2 weeks for computerized typesetting.
- 6 weeks for printing.
In most schools a small (20-lesson) course takes at least 9 months to get on the shelf. This is 9 months of actual production time, and doesn't include the planning and research preliminary to course development.
Step 9 Prepare the Lessons
Now, it's production time! As project manager, you will want to monitor adherence to time schedules, coordinate staff, evaluate adherence to quality standards and format, and make on-the-spot adjustments. For example, at any one time during this phase you might well be coordinating the following activities of different lessons:
| manuscript submissions | catalog copy |
| editing | ad copy and layout |
| copyright permissions | subject expert reviews |
| hardware purchasing | direct mail letter copy |
| artwork | envelope design |
| design and packaging | student records design |
| printing | hiring more instructors |
| field testing | securing accreditation/approvals |
Look confusing to you? A good schedule will help you monitor production.
Step 10 Field Test the Course
This step is observed by only a fraction of schools today. Were more schools to do testing, costly printing errors could be avoided. In a field test, a control group of students from the proposed target audience is selected to take the course. This group is then asked to fill out an evaluation form about the course. A few of the things about the course which can be learned from a field test are: typographical errors, reading ease, adequacy of how to study instructions, examination difficulty, adequacy of packaging, how dull or interesting the course is, and (to a limited extent) how well learning objectives are met.
During the field test, instructors can be trained, student service systems developed, computer software brought on line, and all of the other administrative systems which make running a home study school challenging can be "debugged."
Step 11 Management Review
In this step the course developer will want to submit the field test results and the overall course to top management for analysis. Aspects of the review can include:
- Opinions from subject matter experts.
- Final marketing decisions—approval of the marketing plan.
- Securing outside approval and accreditation.
- Final pricing decisions.
- Inventory levels needed.
- Final design and packaging decisions.
The overall goal of the management review is to assure that the final product looks like what everyone wanted it to look like and to be reasonably sure the heavy expenses of marketing will be justified. Management may adjust sales forecasts, realign budgets, commit more or less advertising dollars, shift funds from current course ad budgets to the new course, etc.
In some cases, top management may even send the course back to the developer for massive revisions—or even cancel the course. It has happened more than once! It is far better to take a "big bath" up front than to suffer years of drop-by-drop torture.
Step 12 Final Edit and Production
All of the "input" from the field test, top management review, subject experts, and accrediting agencies can then be carefully evaluated and implemented into final course production. At this point two items are critical:
- A "single controlling mind" should decide what happens—this insures that a consistent course product will result.
- A close working relationship with a printer is needed. There is simply no substitute for a reputable printer—one who meets deadlines with top quality work. The school of experience will tell you whom to use.
Step 13 Marketing and Services
This is the final point in the process. The ads have been placed, market fulfillment is being done, enrollments are coming in. It is time now to:
- Evaluate results—Is the course meeting your expectations? Are enrollment levels what were projected? Are students satisfied?
- Begin revision cycle—What errors need immediate correction? What service problems have arisen? What lessons are causing dropouts? Are new lessons/kits needed?
Conclusion
In this lesson you have seen only a broad overview of the course development process. Space prohibits in depth treatment of each of the production steps.
Our goal in this lesson was to describe how you should schedule the production of a new course. The steps you have read here can be modified. There are dozens of techniques within each step which weren't covered. However, the essentials of planning a course were listed. It is up to you to modify the steps to suit your own school's method and management style.
We have brushed over the idea that the school's marketing staff should be involved in new course selection and development. The marketing department is absolutely essential to the course's success. They will have valuable insights to give on course design and course packaging. They must prepare catalogs, flyers, ads, literature, and contracts which will complement the course. The only way to assure consistency is to bring the promotional staff into the picture early in the course development process.
The NHSC has for sale manuals which describe many of the topics in this lesson in much greater detail:
Home Study Course Development Handbook (1988)
Home Study Student Service Handbook (1981)
PR Handbook (1988)
Write to the NHSC to order your copies.
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