Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

The previous lesson left you with a set of training objectives: a list of what a national must be able to do, under what conditions, and to what standard, each one traced back to a real gap. That list is the raw material of a course, but it is not yet a course. Design is the work of turning it into one. It decides what will be taught, in what order, by what method, and how the College will know each national has reached the standard, and it sets all of that out on paper so that any qualified instructor can pick it up and run it.

This lesson teaches you to do that turning. You will see how objectives become lessons and how those lessons are sequenced so that each one stands on the last, building from the known to the unknown and from the simple to the complex. You will see how the method is matched to the objective, so that skills are taught by EDIP and knowledge by explanation and discussion. You will see how an assessment plan is built that is valid, reliable, fair, and transparent, drawing on what TRG 310 taught about assessment. And you will see how the whole thing is captured, with its programme and timings, in a single document called the course specification.

By the end you will be able to group and sequence training objectives into a logical course of lessons, choose a teaching method that fits each objective, draft an assessment plan that meets the four tests of a good assessment, lay out a realistic programme with timings, and assemble all of this into a course specification.

This is the knowledge layer. Designing a real course is mastered by doing it under the eye of an experienced designer, and a course specification you draft on this course is reviewed and signed off in person, where supervision allows, before any course built from it is allowed to run. What follows teaches the method and the discipline of thought; the practice comes after.

Key Terms

Course design: the stage of the systems approach to training that turns a set of training objectives into a structured course, deciding the lessons, their sequence, the methods, the assessment, and the programme.
Training objective: a statement of what a national must be able to do, written as performance, conditions, and standard; the unit of work that design organises into lessons. Taught in full in Lesson 02.
Enabling objective: a smaller step that a national must master on the way to a training objective; the lower rungs of the ladder that lead up to the real task.
Sequence: the order in which lessons are taught, arranged so that each lesson rests on what came before, moving from the known to the unknown and from the simple to the complex.
Method: the way an objective is taught; EDIP for a practical skill, explanation and discussion and confirmation for knowledge, and so on, chosen to fit what is being learned.
EDIP: the Commonwealth method for teaching a skill, in four stages, Explanation, Demonstration, Imitation, and Practice. Taught in full in TRG 301.
Assessment plan: the part of the design that says how each objective will be tested, by what instrument, and to what pass standard, built to be valid, reliable, fair, and transparent.
Valid, reliable, fair, transparent: the four tests of a sound assessment, that it measures the right thing, gives the same result whoever marks it, treats every national even-handedly, and tells the national in advance what is expected. From TRG 310.
Programme: the timetable of the course, the lessons and assessments laid out across the available hours and days, with timings that are honest about how long things take.
Course specification: the single controlled document that captures the whole design, from objectives through lessons, methods, assessment, and programme; the master plan a developer then builds from.

From objectives to a course

Design begins with the objectives in front of you and one steady habit of mind: do not start by thinking about lessons. Start by thinking about what the national must be able to do at the end, then work backwards to find every step that leads there. A course is built from the finish line back, not from the first morning forwards.

Take the objectives one at a time and ask, for each, what a national needs to know or be able to do before they can meet it. Those smaller steps are the enabling objectives, the lower rungs of the ladder. A training objective such as "load, make ready, and clear the section's primary weapon, safely, to the drill standard" sits at the top of a short ladder whose rungs include naming the parts, understanding the safety rules, and handling the weapon empty before ever handling it loaded. Mapping those rungs is the first real act of design, because the rungs, not the top of the ladder, are what individual lessons will teach.

Once you have the rungs for every objective, you group them. Related rungs that share a subject or a setting become a lesson; a heavy objective may need several lessons; a few light ones may share one. The aim of grouping is a lesson that has a single clear aim of its own and can be taught and confirmed in one sitting. A lesson trying to do five unrelated things is a sign the grouping is wrong, and so is a lesson too thin to fill its slot.

   OBJECTIVES BECOME LESSONS

   TRAINING OBJECTIVE (the task, at standard)
        |
        |  break down into
        v
   ENABLING OBJECTIVES (the rungs)
     - rung 1  ----\
     - rung 2  -----\___  group related rungs
     - rung 3  -----/        into
     - rung 4  ----/         |
        |                    v
        |               LESSON(S)
        |             each with one clear aim
        v
   ASSESSMENT confirms the TRAINING OBJECTIVE is met

Throughout, keep the discipline that Lesson 02 began: decide what not to teach as firmly as what to teach. A rung that a national already stands on, because an earlier course or an entry standard delivered it, is not taught again. Every lesson must earn its place by carrying a national closer to an objective. Time is the one resource you can never get more of, and a course bloated with nice-to-know material steals time from the must-know.

Sequencing the lessons

A course is more than a set of good lessons; it is good lessons in the right order. Sequence is what lets each lesson rest its weight on the one before, so that nothing is taught before the ground for it has been laid. Two old principles guide it, and they usually point the same way.

The first is known to unknown. Begin where the national already stands and build outward from it. A new idea is far easier to grasp when it is hung on something familiar, so the early lessons connect to what nationals bring with them and each later lesson connects to what the course has already given them. This is why a course rarely opens with its hardest material: there is nothing yet to attach it to.

The second is simple to complex. Teach the plain version of a thing before the complicated one, the single step before the sequence, the drill in slow time before the drill at speed. Complexity is added in layers onto a foundation that is already firm, never dumped on a national all at once. A national who has the simple case secure can absorb the awkward exception; a national still wrestling with the basics cannot.

These two carry a third principle with them, that of the prerequisite: wherever lesson B needs something lesson A delivers, A must come first, with no exceptions for convenience of the timetable. Map the prerequisites before you fix the order, because they are the hard constraints; the rest of the sequence is yours to arrange for the best flow. Safety prerequisites are absolute. No national handles a loaded weapon, enters a hazardous activity, or is assessed on a skill before the lesson that makes that safe has been taught and confirmed.

   BUILDING THE SEQUENCE

   simple ----------------------------> complex
   known  ----------------------------> unknown

   Lesson 1   Lesson 2   Lesson 3   Lesson 4   Assessment
   [ base ]   [ +adds ]  [ +adds ]  [ +adds ]  [ the task ]
      |__________^ rests on  ^           ^
                  |__________^ rests on  ^
                             |___________^ rests on
                  (each lesson stands on the ones before)

   PREREQUISITE RULE: if B needs A, A is taught and
   confirmed before B. Safety prerequisites are absolute.

When the prerequisites are honoured and the flow runs from known to unknown and simple to complex, the course feels, to the national living through it, as though each lesson arrived exactly when it was needed. That feeling is not luck. It is the sequence working.

Matching the method to the objective

With the lessons grouped and ordered, each one needs a method: the way it will actually be taught. The rule is simple to state and easy to get wrong under time pressure. Match the method to what is being learned, not to what is convenient to deliver.

A practical skill, something a national does with their hands or their body, a weapon drill, a knot, a bandage, a piece of foot drill, is taught by EDIP: Explanation of the skill and why it matters, Demonstration of it done correctly, Imitation by the national step by step under correction, and Practice until competent. You met EDIP in full in TRG 301. The designer's job is to recognise which objectives are skills and to allow, in the programme, the time EDIP honestly needs, because its power is in the imitation and practice and those cannot be rushed.

Knowledge, something a national must understand or recall, the safety rules, the law of self-defence, the parts of a thing and what they do, is taught by explanation, discussion, and confirmation. It is shown, talked through, questioned, and checked, and the questioning keeps the national active rather than merely sat in front of the instructor. Attitudes and judgement, harder things such as the discipline of a safety habit or the bearing expected of a member, are taught more by example, by realistic scenario, and by discussion than by any drill, and they take longer to settle than either skill or knowledge.

   METHOD FITS THE OBJECTIVE

   What is being learned       Method
   ------------------------    ---------------------------
   Practical SKILL             EDIP
   (do it with hands/body)     Explain, Demonstrate,
                               Imitate, Practise

   KNOWLEDGE                   Explanation + discussion
   (understand / recall)       + questioning + confirmation

   ATTITUDE / JUDGEMENT        Example, realistic scenario,
   (how to think / behave)     guided discussion, reflection

   Rule: choose the method for the LEARNING, never for the
   convenience of the instructor or the timetable.

Most objectives are honest about which kind they are if you read them plainly. A verb such as load, fit, apply, or carry points to a skill; a verb such as state, explain, or describe points to knowledge; an objective about judgement or conduct points to attitude. When an objective seems to be two things at once, it is usually two objectives that were not properly separated in the analysis, and the cleaner fix is to split it.

Building the assessment plan

A course that teaches but never checks is a hope, not a course. The assessment plan is the part of the design that turns the objectives into the thing the qualification certifies, by saying, for each objective, how it will be tested, by what instrument, and to what pass standard. The golden thread of the whole systems approach runs through here: every objective is assessed, and nothing is assessed that is not an objective. If you find yourself testing something the course never set out to teach, the plan is wrong; if an objective has no assessment, a national could be certified without ever showing they can do it.

TRG 310 gave you the four tests every assessment must pass, and the designer is the person who builds them in from the start. An assessment is valid when it measures the very thing the objective describes, in its real conditions and to its real standard. The honest test of a practical skill is to have the national perform it; a written question about a skill checks knowledge of it, not the skill, and quietly breaks validity. An assessment is reliable when it gives the same result whoever marks it and whenever it is run, which means a clear marking scheme and a defined pass standard rather than an assessor's general impression. It is fair when every national is judged even-handedly, by the same standard, under the same conditions, with reasonable adjustment only for genuine need and never a lowering of the bar. It is transparent when nationals are told in advance what they will be assessed on and what the pass standard is, because the College's purpose is to make members competent, not to catch them out.

   ASSESSMENT PLAN: ONE ROW PER OBJECTIVE

   Objective         Instrument         Pass standard   Tests met
   ---------------   ----------------   -------------   ---------
   OBJ 1 (skill)     Practical test     drill standard  V R F T
   OBJ 2 (knowledge) Written / oral Q   correct safety  V R F T
                                        rules stated
   OBJ 3 (skill)     Observed task      to time, safe   V R F T

   V valid  R reliable  F fair  T transparent
   GOLDEN THREAD: every objective is assessed; nothing is
   assessed that is not an objective.

Decide too whether each assessment is a gateway that must be passed before a national goes on, or a check along the way, and where the safety-critical assessments sit, because a national who has not proved a safety skill cannot be let near the activity it protects. Plan the assessments as you sequence the lessons, not as an afterthought bolted on at the end, so that each falls in its proper place in the programme.

The programme and timings

Now the design meets the clock. The programme lays the lessons and assessments out across the hours and days the course is given, in the sequence you have fixed, and it is where good intentions collide with the truth of how long things actually take. An honest programme is the difference between a course that runs as designed and one that abandons its last lessons because it has run out of morning.

Time every lesson and every assessment for how long it really needs, and remember that EDIP skills are slow because practice cannot be hurried, that confirmation and questioning take real minutes, and that nationals learn at different rates so the slower must still reach the standard. Build in margin. A programme packed to the last minute has no room for the lesson that needs reteaching or the morning that starts late, and it is the reteaching that gets sacrificed, which is exactly the part that secures the standard. Leave breaks, because a tired class learns badly, and the instructor's duty of care does not pause for the timetable. Where a course mixes online self-study with in-person practical work, the programme must show plainly which parts are which and how they hand over, so that nothing assessed in person is reached before the knowledge layer behind it has been studied.

A realistic programme is also an honest claim about the course's length. If the objectives genuinely need more hours than the course is given, that is a finding to surface, not a problem to hide by cramming, because a crammed course quietly drops to a lower standard while still issuing the same certificate.

In Practice: Sergeant Adeya designs the section radio course

Sergeant Adeya is handed a need from the analysis: too many sections cannot reliably pass a clear voice message on the section radio, and the gap is a genuine training one. Three training objectives come with it: operate the section radio set safely and correctly; pass a clear voice message using the correct procedure; and carry out basic faultfinding when a set will not work, all to the section standard.

She does not begin with lessons. She breaks each objective into its rungs. Operating the set needs knowing its parts and controls, the safety rules for the battery and antenna, and switching on and netting in. Passing a message needs the phonetic alphabet, the prowords, the shape of a message, and then sending and receiving one for real. Faultfinding needs the few common faults and a simple drill to work through them. She groups the rungs into four lessons: the set and its safety; voice procedure; sending and receiving; and faultfinding.

She sequences them known to unknown and simple to complex. The set comes first because every other lesson uses it. Voice procedure, pure knowledge, comes before sending, because a national cannot send a message in a procedure they have not met. Sending and receiving, the heart of the course, comes third, once the set and the procedure are both secure. Faultfinding comes last, because it makes most sense to a national who already knows how the set should behave. The safety rules for the set are an absolute prerequisite to everything that follows.

She matches the methods. Operating the set and sending a message are skills, so they are taught by EDIP, with real time allowed for practice on real sets. Voice procedure and the safety rules are knowledge, taught by explanation, discussion, and plenty of questioning. Then she builds the assessment plan: an observed practical test of operating the set and passing a message, valid because the national actually does it, marked against a clear scheme so it is reliable, run the same way for everyone so it is fair, with the standard handed out in advance so it is transparent. The set-safety assessment is a gateway that must be passed before any national keys a live set.

Finally she draws the programme across the time she has been given, times each EDIP lesson honestly, leaves margin for reteaching the national who is slow to net in, and marks which parts are studied online and which are signed off in person. All of it, objectives, lessons, sequence, methods, assessment, and programme, she writes into one course specification and submits it for review and sign-off before a single session is taught. The reviewer can see, at a glance, that every objective is taught and every objective is assessed. That is the design done.

Check Your Understanding

Why does a course designer begin from the training objectives and work backwards, rather than starting by listing lessons? What are the enabling objectives, and what role do they play in deciding what each lesson teaches?
Explain the principles of "known to unknown" and "simple to complex", and the prerequisite rule, and say why safety prerequisites are treated as absolute.
Name the four tests every assessment must pass, and explain what the "golden thread" between objectives and assessment means and why breaking it is dangerous.

Reflection (write a short paragraph): Think of a course you have been taught, in the Army or in civilian life, that felt either well sequenced or badly sequenced. Describe one place where a lesson did or did not rest properly on what came before, and what you, as the designer, would have ordered differently and why.

Summary

Design turns a set of training objectives into a structured course, deciding the lessons, their sequence, the methods, the assessment, and the programme, and capturing all of it in a course specification.
Work backwards from the objectives: break each into its enabling objectives, the rungs of the ladder, and group related rungs into lessons that each have one clear aim. Teach only what carries a national towards an objective, and decide firmly what not to teach.
Sequence the lessons known to unknown and simple to complex, honouring every prerequisite, and treat safety prerequisites as absolute, so each lesson rests on the ones before it.
Match the method to the learning: EDIP for practical skills, explanation and discussion and confirmation for knowledge, example and scenario for attitude and judgement, never the convenience of the timetable.
Build an assessment plan that is valid, reliable, fair, and transparent, with every objective assessed and nothing assessed that is not an objective, drawing on TRG 310.
Lay out a programme with honest timings and real margin, showing online and in-person parts clearly, and surface it as a finding if the objectives need more time than the course is given.
This lesson follows Lesson 02 · Analysing the Training Need and leads into Lesson 04 · Developing the Materials, where the course specification becomes lesson plans and assessment instruments. It draws on TRG 301 · Methods of Instruction (EDIP and method) and TRG 310 · Assessment and Course Supervision (the four tests), and feeds PME 210 · Basic Staff Duties and Written Orders (writing the specification) and ADM 220 · Course Records and Qualification Tracking (what the qualification certifies).

Designing the Course