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Designing Classroom Exercises for Highly Technical Content

 

Good training helps companies develop happy and productive workers. If organizations are going to spend thousands of dollars on conducting training for their employees and thousands more in lost productivity from taking employees away from their jobs for training, then they need to maximize their return on that considerable investment. Organizations need to make sure they are doing everything they can to ensure that the training is useful, that they are using the most modern teaching methods, and that their employees are getting the most out of their class and time away from work. Incorporating useful exercises into the course can accomplish this.

This chapter will discuss aspects related to designing valuable classroom exercises for highly technical content.

Why Activity Is Important

We all remember “the 100 percent lecture course”—that mind-numbing classroom experience in which a professor droned on for hours and the only break in the monotony was the clicking of a PowerPoint slide or the ticking of the slowly moving wall-hung clock. Sadly, many technical training courses mirror this experience.

There is a myth that telling equals training (Hannum, 2009). However, there is a difference between a learner listening to information and a learner actually acquiring knowledge (Hannum, 2009). The act of sitting in a classroom and listening or observing a class is called passive learning. Active learning is the opposite. Active learning involves participation in activities and the compelling of learners to engage in the subject matter itself. Examples of active learning include completing a worksheet, participating in class discussion, working through a simulation, and so on. The consensus of the training industry is that effective training courses incorporate active learning principles.

Lecture can be useful and does have its place in training, but as lecture tends to be grossly overrepresented, its usage must be minimized. You can include a passive learning element such as lecture or direct instruction in your course, but it needs to be managed properly. The next section explains why.

The Primacy-Recency Effect

In 1962, a psychologist named Bennet Murdock conducted an experiment in which he gave participants a list of items to memorize. When Murdock later asked these participants to recall the items on the list, he discovered an interesting phenomenon. Across the board, participants tended to remember the same items from the list. Specifically, they tended to remember items at the beginning and the end of the list, with their recall of items in the middle tapering off. This effect, known as the serial position effect, or primacy-recency effect, is of particular interest to those who develop technical training.

Incorporating the Primacy-Recency Effect

To best benefit from the primacy-recency effect in your course design, you must abstain from including long, drawn-out lectures in the class. As noted, the primacy-recency effect explains that the learner’s retention is greatest for information at the beginning and end of a section. Thus, there is a lack of retention for material in the gulf between those two points. The longer the lecture, the greater the gulf between beginning and end. If you want to give learners the best chance to remember something in a class, you need to limit lecture to short segments and provide activities (breaks) in between. These breaks in the lecture function as starting and stopping points, or beginnings and endings, thus giving the learners more of a chance to remember items covered within the lecture portions of the class.

Consider this example. With a three-hour lecture that includes no activities, learners are given only one beginning (primacy effect) and one end (recency effect) through which to remember information. Thus, we are giving learners only two chances to maximize their retention (see Figure 7–1). If, however, that three-hour lecture is roughly broken into half-hour segments interspersed with activities, as in Figure 7–2, the learners are given six beginnings and six ends, or a total of 12 opportunities to maximize retention. From this example, it is clear that by segmenting lecture with activities, you are giving learners more beginning and end points at which to remember information.

Activities

It is not difficult to look at the research (and your own experiences) and determine that lecture—by itself—does not make for an effective course. Activity is crucial for any classroom, especially one with subject matter as difficult and complex as that found in technical training courses. Remember, with “activity” we are not talking about “Let’s all get up and stretch” or “15 minutes for coffee and bathroom breaks.” We’re talking about active learning sessions—exercises, group problem solving, or critical thinking sessions that use different learning techniques and engage the learners’ brains in ways beyond passive listening.

But what kinds of activities are necessary in a training course? The simple answer is any and all that help to meet the course objectives. Research shows that it is not so much the specific type of interactivity that is significant, but more that interactivity in general is incorporated into the learning. This interactivity can include worksheets, review questions, group work, presentations, brainstorming, hands-on practicals, or case studies.

Basically, if you have incorporated a variety of learning methods within your class, you have created an effective environment (Lalley & Miller, 2007).

Three Categories of Exercises

Exercises may fall into one of three categories. The categories, in ascending order, indicate the amount of technical knowledge necessary to design the activities. Category A exercises are generally related to the subject matter, meaning a developer can typically create these activities with limited involvement of the subject matter expert (SME). Category C exercises are so specifically related to the subject matter that a developer cannot create them without direct input from the SME. Category B exercises are somewhere in between.

Category A

Category A exercises are the easiest and quickest to develop. They are response-oriented exercises, meaning that the technical developer poses some sort of question or a subject for discussion, and the learners’ exercise is to come up with a response.

These exercises can be easily applied to many situations. The questions posed by the training developer are general enough that they could pertain more or less to any technical product or task.

To generate Category A exercises, think about questions regarding the product or task in a general sense and then write these general questions down in a worksheet. As a developer, you really need no specific technical knowledge to create these types of questions and exercises. The following are examples of Category A exercise questions that incorporate generic language that can apply to multiple topics:

• List items you need to consider before performing a task.
• Analyze your job. Describe what can go wrong, why this might happen, and how you could fix it.
• What information do you need to gather before you perform a task?
• Name three things that you learned in this section. Describe how they are related to your job.
• Describe one concept covered in the lecture that you think novice learners might have trouble with. Prepare a five-minute presentation.
• Choose one concept from the lecture and visually depict it on a poster.

These open-ended Category A exercises tend to work well for experienced and highly motivated learners. With Category A exercises, learners are able to build on their own experience, and they are actually the ones who guide where the learning goes. Category A exercises let the learners’ knowledge determine the level of content discussed.

This leads, however, to a possible drawback of Category A exercises. By allowing an individual class to determine what topics are covered, you run the risk of a “runaway classroom” in which the learners take the class so far off track that the training goals suffer. In addition, it can be hard to set consistent standards of what a particular exercise in a course is supposed to cover when responses are allowed to run wild.

Another downside is that the class can be limited by lack of experience. Category A exercises are generally not as effective for inexperienced, novice learners. If learners have little experience to draw on, the discussion will be limited, as will the places that the course can go. The exercises may not lead the learners to the correct objectives.

Still, for motivated and experienced learners, Category A exercises are quite valuable. They allow for the high knowledge level of the learners to enrich the exercise. In addition, Category A exercises are the easiest and least time consuming exercises to develop.

Category B

Category B exercises are specific to a particular technical topic and are more detailed and structured than Category A exercises. Category B exercises may still take the form of a worksheet, but the questions on the worksheet will be more targeted and specific to the topic and the information surrounding the topic.

Figure 7–3 shows an example of the difference between Category A and Category B exercise questions. Category B exercises will require input from your SME. This makes them generally more time-consuming to develop than Category A exercises. In addition, because these exercises are more focused and specific to the technical content, they do not leave as much room for learners to guide their own learning or to further delve into topics of their individual interests.

 

Figure 7–3. Difference Between Category A and Category B Exercise Questions

Category A	Category B
Question: What can go wrong on a job?	Question: While operating, the pipe separates into two pieces, parting the string. The Outside Diameter of the end piece of pipe that came out of the hole should have been 4-½ in. but instead was measured at 4-3⁄8 in. What happened, and what should you do next? Why?

Still, Category B exercises can be useful because they can direct learners specifically to various learning points. This can be extremely important when the subject matter is new and the training level of your audience is not as advanced. Category B exercises are good for courses in which your training goals are more focused and targeted. In Category B exercises, the instructor, not the learners, guides the training course toward its objectives.

Category C

Category C exercises involve taking the course content and applying it as closely as possible to a job situation for the target audience. These exercises cannot be completed without the direct input and influence of the SME. If done correctly with the right amount of detail, these exercises—referred to as “case study exercises”—are especially suited for transfer of knowledge to the job.

Category C exercises can be summarized as a series of “if-then” scenarios. They include at least two stages of quasi-open-ended choices, with different consequences attached and decisions made and actions taken based on those consequences.

There should be a beginning stage, Stage 1, of at least two choices with different consequences attached. Based on the unique consequence of each choice made from the first decision, at Stage 2 you must (at least) make a second decision that also has unique consequences.

For example, we may pose the question: What tool should we send on the job? Answer options might include Tool A or Tool B. If a learner chooses Tool A, that would lead him or her to answer additional detailed questions based upon that choice of Tool A. Conversely if the learner chooses Tool B, the exercise would lead him or her to an entire other set of follow-up questions based upon Tool B. This cascading tree would continue based upon each question answered.

Figure 7–4 shows the flow of choices and consequences within the two stages.

Category C exercises are case study scenarios that are both rewarding and challenging for learners. These exercises are the closest to what is actually done on the job.

One way to develop Category C exercises is by finding old job reports or histories and reverse engineering them. It is also preferable to ask your SME to go stepby-step through the process of solving the exercise.

A downside of these exercises is that they are the most time-consuming to develop. It can be challenging to comb through all your resources to find the information necessary for questions as in-depth as these. Especially when the case study’s main functionality is a cause-and-effect, question-and-consequence format, the validity and correctness of your information cannot be fudged. You must make sure all loose ends are tied up.

Another drawback of these exercises is that they take up more class time than others do. Thus, if you are planning for a course to include a Category C activity, make sure there is ample time available.

Basically, Category C exercises are the most involved and challenging ones to complete in class and the most involved and challenging to develop. Still, Category C exercises are an excellent means to help learners apply what they have learned in the classroom to the job.

In summary, there are three categories of exercises. The categories are labeled based on their difficulty to develop and the amount of technical knowledge necessary to create them. Category A exercises are open-ended, generic exercises that could apply to topics across the board and require the least amount of SME input. Category B exercises are generally more controlled, targeted exercises that are specific to a particular topic and require specific answers. Finally, Category C exercises are case scenarios that provide the learner with multiple stages of if-then choices, all leading to different outcomes.

 

Figure 7–5. Summary of Categories of Exercises

Category of Exercise	Description
Category A	• Easiest to develop. • Knowledge level of learners determines the level of content discussed. • Can be applied to many situations. • Can be vague. • Questions are open-ended. • Relatively quick to develop. • Works well for experienced and highly motivated learners.
Category B	• Targeted questions and exercises. • Cannot be applied word for word to just any topic. • Content and questions are specific to a particular subject. • Takes longer to develop than Category A; less time than Category C. • Ideal for introductory or intermediate courses in which you need to point learners directly to the knowledge you want them to gain. • Often used for targeted, guided training that points learners toward a specific objective and learning outcome.
Category C	• Case studies. • Closest classroom exercise to what is actually done on the job. • Most involved exercise to develop. • Most involved exercise for learners to complete. • Rewarding for learners to complete. • Requires at least two choices to be made based on unique consequences. • Learners are provided different consequences based on the decisions they make during the exercises. Learners must be able to make at least two separate choices.

Building a Library of Examples

Your life as a developer will become easier if you continuously work to build a library of examples of previous exercises you have created. These examples can come in handy when you are trying to describe for your SME something that does not yet exist for the current technical topic. Sometimes it can be difficult for an SME to understand what exactly you are seeking. Instead of simply saying “I need a case study,” you can say “I need a case study like this one, but involving your own topic.” Showing examples can allow your SME to understand the level of detail you want. Having examples of your work can also help explain what you do at the beginning of a project and can provide an example of what the end product will be.

Creating a library of examples is also helpful in gaining the trust of new SMEs with whom you’ve never worked and getting them to buy in to the technical design process. (Please review chapter 6 for further explanation.)

Ideas for Exercises

The following are some potential ideas for exercises that you can use in your technical training projects, divided by the three categories outlined previously.

CATEGORY A EXERCISES

What Would You Have Done?

Divide learners into pairs. Ask them to think of a job they have recently accomplished. Ask them to share the descriptions of this job (conditions, location, circumstances, and so on) with their partner and have them ask their partner what he or she would have done if he or she was in the same situation. Let the partners make their guesses and then have the original learners disclose what actually happened on the job. After they have been given ample time to discuss, open the discussions to the class. Ask a few groups to share what they learned.

This exercise gets learners talking about their experiences. It also gets them to think about other alternative actions they could have chosen on the job.

 

Resource Share

Divide learners into groups. Ask them to come up with a list of all the resources they currently use to do their jobs, including electronic files, computer programs, personalized spreadsheets, books, manuals, cheat sheets, handbooks, brochures, websites, and so on. Have each group present its list to the rest of the class and explain where each of these resources can be found. Encourage learners to share their own resources with others. Provide a prize to the group that provides the rest of the class with the most resources.

This exercise is good for allowing learners to share the location of resources related to the job.

 

Job Aid Lecture Break

After the instructor gives a lecture, stop and give the participants 10 minutes to make a job aid based on what they see as relevant material that will help them to do their jobs better.

This simple exercise allows learners to specifically apply material covered in class to the job.

 

Lead the Blind

Divide learners into pairs. In each pair, blindfold one learner and have the other lead the first one to different products placed around the room. The blindfolded learner must describe out loud what he or she feels (for example, here is a smooth, concave object, and so forth) and then ask questions to determine what the product is. The pair moves on to the next tool after the blindfolded learner identifies the product. You can space the products around the room, and when the partners get about halfway, you can have them switch the blindfold.

This exercise is good for physical, tactile learners who enjoy being actively involved and using their hands.

CATEGORY B EXERCISES

Piece of the Puzzle

Enlarge a picture of a system. Cut out the different components. Give each learner a component of the system, and then ask the learners to get together to arrange all of their pieces together in order to build the system. After the class has “built” the system, ask each participant to explain what role his or her particular component plays in the entire process.

This exercise is good for instances when participants need to learn the process of a system, or how a piece of equipment functions internally.

 

Explain the Assembly

Pass out sample product or tool assembly drawings to each group. Instruct the learners to

• explain the use of the assembly
• label the individual components shown on the assembly drawing and explain how the individual components function
• circle any weak points in the configuration and give their rationale for these choices.

Have the learners give a group presentation to the rest of the class when they are finished. Discuss the results.

This exercise allows learners to discuss the internal components and functioning of a technical product.

 

Right and Wrong Assemblies

Divide learners into groups, and pass out three or more assembly drawings to each group. At least one assembly drawing should be incorrect. Ask the learners to analyze the drawings and determine which ones are correct and which ones are not. They will have to explain their rationale.

This exercise is good for helping participants learn about the internal functioning of a product as well as for providing a platform to practice catching common errors.

 

Design Your Own Equipment

Give your learners a hypothetical job scenario. Ask them to design their own tool or system to meet the needs of the job. The only caveat is that they cannot use any existing equipment the company has or any that they know a competitor has. Ask the learners to come up with a picture of their design as well as a basic description of how the design works. During discussion, ask learners to relate the functionality of their made-up equipment to the functionality of equipment the company actually carries.

This exercise allows learners to think about what is possible, as well as to see where existing equipment is useful.

CATEGORY C EXERCISES

Case Scenario

Divide learners into groups and provide them with a list of job characteristics. (If possible, give this information on the actual platform—for example, job order forms—that learners use on the job.) Ask the groups to choose equipment for that scenario. Have them present their equipment choices to you, the “customer.” Based on the information they give you, either accept the equipment choices or change the equipment slightly. As a second part of this exercise, based on the equipment selected, learners must create a running procedure. As a final step of the case scenario, give groups a specific description of something that has gone wrong on their job, based on their equipment and running procedure. Learners must identify why this mistake occurred and what to do to fix it. Groups should share their answers with the class.

This exercise is a good way to simulate the steps and the decisions that learners are likely to face on the job.

Taking a Critical Look at Exercises

There will be times in your course development that you come across a complex technical topic that, upon asking your SME a few questions, suddenly becomes very clear to you! This is exciting for you, and in your exuberance, you may decide that this particular point is one that should have an extensive exercise in your course because it made the topic so much clearer to you and it will be the secret ticket to understanding the subject and . . . slow down. Before running off and adding a half day to the course to incorporate your newfound understanding into course exercises, make sure that you double-check with your SME that the point is one most people find difficult to understand, and that the concept is truly one that’s important to the course.

Although you, as a person with a novice understanding of the technical topic, may find this nugget of information to be perfect for your course, it may be akin to teaching basic arithmetic to an audience of astrophysicists.

It doesn’t matter how good your newfound exercise might be; if most people already understand the concept or the concept is not that important to the course, then not much time needs to be spent on it. You must be able to accept this.

Getting It Done

Sound instructional principles still apply even when a topic is highly technical. This is the basic mantra of technical training design. New teaching strategies have replaced “the 100 percent lecture course.” Although your SME might be accustomed to simple lecture plus PowerPoint, this is not the most effective style of training. A complicated topic does not mean that it is OK for the instruction to include only a PowerPoint lecture. As we learned with the primacy-recency effect, lectures should be broken apart in order to maximize retention. There are a variety of exercises that can be included in the class that can function to support course objectives and to break up the lecture.

Exercises can take a number of forms, from the generic Category A exercise to the specific Category B exercise to the involved Category C exercise. It is important that you begin to build a library of examples so that you can better explain to your SME what you want. While there are a variety of exercises that you can incorporate into your class, you still need to keep the objectives of the course in mind. If an exercise does not help to meet a course objective, it is not needed in the training class.

In summary, incorporating a variety of useful, relevant, and challenging exercises increases the value of technical training.

 

Worksheet 7–1. Sample Category A Exercise

The following is a Category A worksheet that could more or less apply to most technical topics. You can use this example as an exercise for your course.

Contingencies
Analyze your job. Describe what can go wrong on a job, why this can happen, and possible options to fix the problem.
What can go wrong	Why this happens	How to fix it

 

Worksheet 7–2. Sample Category C Exercise

The following is a worksheet that you can use to create a Categorgy C exercise for your course.