To design a good learning environment, you need to ask the right questions. "What is the syllabus?" is not the right question. Answering the six questions below won't make your job easier -- they could even make it harder -- but they will help you address the right problem.
The first three questions focus on what needs to be taught. In my experience, more designs fall apart here than anywhere else. You need to know the real goals of the course and the real obstacles to overcome.
The last three questions are about what learning activities might address the goals and obstacles identified by the first three questions.
Start with mistakes and failures. You need those in order to know
To whom do these mistakes matter? In particular, to whom do they matter that your target audience cares about? The students themselves? Future employers? Their peers? You need to know this to able to design motivating learning experiences.
Thus, the answer "Students incorrectly convert fractions to decimals" is, at best, incomplete, because it doesn't answer the question, "Who cares? Why?" If you can't say why these mistakes matter, why should students care if they make them?
People do things for a reason. What's really causing the mistakes they're making?
If the answer is "they don't know what to do," no course is needed. Just give people a book of instructions. No one takes a course on how to shampoo their hair. They just read the label on the bottle.
More likely, mistakes are made because the task involves things that are
Don't accept easy answers, like "they don't know better." Some modules in driver education seem to be based on the belief that people drive drunk because they don't know better. Hardly.
Don't accept vague answers, e.g., "people don't know what good investments are." Ask "why not?" Explanations of causes of failure usually need to go several levels deep. Keep asking for examples and "why" and "why not" until you hit root causes.
People naturally learn from failure. Is that OK here? A learning environment is needed only if this isn't a reasonable answer. Some reasons why learning from failure might not work are:
Knowing the answer to this question will guide the design of "better than real life" learning environments.
Finally, we get to some design questions.
If you've answered the first three questions, you know what people do wrong, why, and what the obstacles to learning are. Now you can start proposing designs. A learning design is a set of activities and an environment that
For example, suppose you were doing a "drunk driving" module, and have answered the first three questions thus:
These answers justify creating a learning environment, and tell us that the environment has to change their belief that their driving isn't impaired by drinking. It's hard to see how to do this other than getting them to see observable and dramatic effects of alcohol on their driving. So a possible design would be to take them to a video arcade and videotape their performance in a race car game before and after drinking.
Watch out for designs that don't address the mistakes, underlying cognitive causes, and obstacles to learning. For example, don't give people afraid of driving scenarios simulating treacherous driving situations. Don't give budget planning scenarios showing how rich you'll be when you retire to teenagers who could care less about retirement.
Identify pitfalls and show-stoppers early on. There are limitations inherent in simulated environments. For example, teaching investing skills is hard to do if no real money is involved. There are limitations inherent in computer-based designs. Computers can't understand everyday English, they can't respond to open-ended students designs, and so on. There are limitations that arise from social or political sensitivities. The state department of transportation may be unwilling to fund a course on drunken driving that gets people drunk!
Pitfalls like these need to be addressed. If not, there's no point to going any further.
Test your design idea before putting anything on the computer or even in a substantial design document. Can you really come up with a convincing coherent concrete example of a learner doing something that, combined with the appropriate feedback, will lead to learning? In answering Question 4, it's OK to say "they'll drive a simulated car in difficult weather conditions." For this question, you need to show that you can come up with specific scenarios that lead to actual learning events, e.g., "they'll drive on an icy highway, encounter a several car pile-up, and, if they brake too fast, will go into a skid."
Developing this first scenario is critical. It's the acid test for whether actual learning episodes can be created in the chosen design. The first scenario sets the pattern for scenarios to come. If the first scenario is unconvincing, hard to complete, or hard to even come up with, go back to Question 4 and re-think your solution.