The Writers Gateway

Have you seen a kid take a toy apart and fix the toy together again?  This might seem like a childish act of taking things apart just for fun. But then this childish act of taking things apart can also be a huge learning process. 

Here is someone who talks about how he and his son break down a musical piece and  learn to put the parts and phrases together:

Just like working through a reverse engineering problem, my son and I first break each piece down into its individual phrases.  We then experiment with different strategies for learning each phrase, often further breaking a phrase down into smaller parts.  We finally “solve”  a piece by slowing putting its parts and phrases back together.

I have also seen people who have no knowledge in HTML design web pages by just analyzing how other web pages have been designed.

When you are trying to learn Instructional Design, you start with the concepts and then go on to do practical exercises on analysis, design and storyboarding.

Well, how about breaking any training material or e-learning course apart before you actually learn to create one?

Yes, I am talking about reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material to learn how to do Instructional Designing.

Before we proceed further, let us understand what reverse engineering is all about.

What is Reverse Engineering?

Wikipedia defines Reverse Engineering as  the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation.

In simple terms, reverse engineering is breaking an object into its basic parts in a logical fashion. It is the process of analyzing and learning how the object was put together.

What does reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material mean?

Reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material means analyzing, finding and documenting the following:

• Who uses the information in the course and for what purpose?
• What could have been the results of the requirements gathering phase?
• What could have been the development process for the course?
• What has been covered in the course?
• How is the course structured?
• How is the information structured?
• How is the course flow designed?
• What are the course objectives and learning objectives and how have they been derived?
• What is the instructional approach used?
• What are the  instructional strategies used and how or why were such strategies used?
• What could be the visualization  for each slide?
• How are the assessments designed?
• How did the Analysis and Design document look like for the course?
• How did the storyboard for the course look like?
• How is the course layout and navigation?

Questions as listed above and many more such questions will help you reverse engineer an e-learning course or any training material.When you are reverse engineering an e-learning course you are not trying to create but trying to think how the course was created. You are not exercising your mind to come up with new ideas. You are thinking hard how ideas for the course have been derived.

The next question is how can such an exercise help you gain Instructional Design skills.

How reverse engineering helps?

Most freshers feel lost while doing instructional designing because they fail to understand the basics and the essence of instructional designing. Freshers feel less confident because they lack basic skills and fear making mistakes.

When you reverse engineer an e-learning course or any training material:

• You gain basic instructional design skills with great ease
• You get to understand all Instructional Design concepts instantly
• You understand the relevance and importance of creating any training material
• You understand what goes into creating an e-learning course or any training material without racking your brain
• You get to know how a storyboard is related to the end product (e-learning course/training material)
• You get the essence of visualization and its importance in creating any training material
• The end product (e-learning course/training material) is your reference and guide so there is no fear of making mistakes
• You are focused and learn faster
• There is no information overload

In short you gain a lot of confidence to do instructional designing on your own.

My experience

When I read this training material on the web: CSharp for Kids, I tried to reverse engineer and find out how story has been woven so well to teach a programming language.I tried to figure how things have been made so simple when the subject is a complex programming language. I was amazed at the use of cartoons in the book and I studied how they have been designed to fit with the story.

Well, this was indeed a great experience and great learning too

Have you tried learning Instructional Designing or anything for that matter through reverse engineering? Please share your thoughts and experiences