Christopher De Gannes
22 Mar 2016, 10:53 PM
Chapters 3 › Unit 3: Backwards Learning Design: Help out Martina! View instructions Hide instructions

Help out Martina!

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Imagine Martina, a junior but enthusiastic project manager in her company’s marketing department. She was recently promoted to Senior Marketing Manager and Team Lead, supervising 3 other staff members she was previously colleagues with. Even though Martina is quite enthusiastic about her new position, she is also anxious about all the paperwork and new responsibilities. After the first few months, she is swamped with work, feeling shy to delegate and struggling to juggle her old tasks as a project manager on top of now reporting to management.

Martina’s boss feels she now needs to learn management and team leading skills, so she approaches her about getting trained. In order for the training to be effective, we need to identify her possible knowledge gaps and desired skills.

So think about what you want Martina to learn. How can you assess this and how do you want her to learn?

Start with the learning objective and design her training backwards. If you prefer to do this by hand, download the worksheet below.

1) What do you want/expect Martina to learn?
Formulate learning objectives and standards: What should Martina know, understand and be able to do by the end?

2) How will you know and make sure that Martina has learned it?
Determine assessment and impact measurement: How can Martina show what she has learned? What should she be able to demonstrate?

3) What learning experience do you want Martina to have?
Design instructions and decide on learning activities and content forms:
How do you want Martina to learn?

Help out Martina!

3
  1. What do you want/expect Martina to Learn?
    By the end, Martina should (1) understand both the theoretical and practical aspects of management and team leadership, as well as, (2) be an effective manager, team leader and role model to her team, in a sustainable manner.

  2. How do you make sure that Martina has learned it?
    Martina needs to be assessed using formative and summative assessment tools and techniques. She needs to display an understanding of both the theoretical and practical underpinnings of management and leadership, within the context of her organizational culture.

  3. What learning experience do you want Martina to have?
    Martina's learning experience could be hybrid: (1) utilising online e-learning tools to broaden her managerial understanding, as well as (2) engaging in guided and mentored simulations and role modeling, to allow her to acquire the practical skills for being an effective and efficient manager.

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Comments

Jocelyn Phelps
about 8 years ago

I love your picture!
Nice, concise response.

Nadezda Chernyak
almost 8 years ago

I totally agree with you that there should be some form of mentorship as Martina needs to apply all management theories in practice straight away. Many course participants recommended in their journals only MOOCs or other forms of online courses that I find would be not enough and highly inefficient as Martina should demonstrate expected behaviors of a manager asap.

Hannes Klöpper
almost 8 years ago

Hi Nadia, of course individual one on one mentoring would be great. But it's also very costly of course. Don't you think that a MOOC could also challenge students
to "demonstrate expected behaviours". A journal exercise for example could also ask a student to respond to a given situation by posting a video response. These kind of virtual role plays definitely come a lot closer to the real thing that just passive consumption of content.

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