An educational programme is a planned and sequential arrangement of educational activities designed to achieve a set of predetermined and explicitly stated educational outcomes. The programme can be simple, consisting of a forty-minute lesson in a classroom, or it can be a slightly megalomaniac attempt to educate every person in a country to vote and to understand the electoral legislation over which politicians and judges have been fighting for years.
In the case of the first, the written programme can consist of a couple of pages in a notebook. The second requires the balancing of a range of programme elements in a coherent strategy, and the development and aligning of resources to meet a series of educational objectives.
The Design Cycle
This topic area requires educators to consider the larger programme and also organize ways in which the smaller programmes can be designed in order to achieve complex objectives.
In order to do this, educators should
Overview of Programme Design Theory
It is possible to construct a range of different educational programmes to achieve a set of agreed objectives. The challenge for the educator is to select that programme which achieves its objectives in the shortest time, with the least resources, and with the greatest chance of effective learning taking place.
It is possible, for example, to learn about aerodynamic theory by working as an apprentice in a shop building an experimental aeroplane, by visiting a wind tunnel, by watching a wind tunnel in operation on a video, by building a model aeroplane out of balsa wood, or by reading a textbook on aerodynamic theory. Each is a valid educational programme, but educators have to make selections based on what they know about their learner constituency, available resources, including money and time, the objectives that must be achieved, and the level of competence that is required.
Programme design requires the application of Occam's razor to develop a programme that is effective and efficient. [1] This is particularly true of programmes that can be seduced by the availability of state funds. Expectations of the powerful or influential can pose a distraction, as can the mistaken belief that the public appearance of the programme is more important than its ability to empower citizens to deal with their social and political environment.
Any programme usually includes activities that are inessential to the achievement of the objectives, or that set out to achieve other objectives. This results from inexperience or the lack of post-event analysis. These unnecessary elements need to be stripped from a programme.
In face-to-face programmes, such inessential components can include particular exercises or theoretical inputs. In public education programmes, these can include public events or advertisements that, for all their fun or the amount of energy that goes into them, make no additional difference to people's behaviour or knowledge.
Notes:
[1] Occam's razor is a thinking technique that includes slicing up questions, usually asked by scientists, and reducing to their essentials the number of possible answers. This technique owes its origin to philosopher William of Occam (d. 1349), and to his saying, "Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity."
