I’m writing technical material for SharePoint 2013. The material will be given as job aids and I will be following my PowerPoint presentation. I’m new to this job and others have been teaching for some time.
I am worried that the material I am writing might be too difficult for students to comprehend. My coworkers write out very simple material because they know that some individuals have never used SharePoint before. Heck, I just learned it and feel I have mastered a large portion of this application.
When it comes to writing out lessons on technology what steps do you take to make sure it’s simple enough for students to understand, yet not “dumbed down” so much that it in insulted their intelligence?
My main concern wouldn’t be insulting their intelligence, it would be keeping their interest without losing them.
For example, if I had a tutorial on how to use namespaces and got right into it those that didn’t have some foundation in OOP wouldn’t understand well enough to follow along. Yet if I went into detail about OOP first those that knew OOP would likely get impatient to get to the “meat”.
Personally I prefer to know right up front what prerequisite knowledge is assumed.
For example, if a tutorial started off with “knowledge of OOP is assumed” and I had no knowledge of OOP I might still read it. Even if the number of "huh?"s started to mount I might continue in hopes that understanding would eventually happen, or that I might gain at least some knowledge if not everything being taught.
I also like a type of introductory “abstract” up front.
For example, if I read “this tutorial explains datatypes and operator precedence before providing examples of how to craft less verbose conditionals” and I already knew datatypes but was interested in operator precedence and conditionals, I could prepare myself for the “wait”.
I also like to have an easy way to “backtrack” to prerequisites so I can learn or refresh that knowledge when I need to.
I also think some sort of questionnaire is in order for each student to fill out at the beginning of the class so I can get a feel of their knowledge on the technical subject. Perhaps a before and after questionnaire on the subject so they can understand what they learned.