Employability Skills
Overview
An integral part of the work I do is developing curriculum and course outlines. This involves organising raw content into easy-to-understand chunks, for example, structuring and breaking down an entire module/course into lessons. Additionally, building learning objective (LOs) to give the learner a sense of what they are going to learn is also very important.
Course Outline
In this project, I pulled upan old course I had worked on called Security Fundaments, a precursor to a CompTIA Security+ certification course for US schools. This lesson is based on employability skills. The course outline (CO) design process follows these steps:
- Research US state standards to find courses that map to the course being built. In this example, the following courses map to Security Fundamentals:
Virginia: Cybersecurity Fundamentals (2019) 6302 (36 weeks) Link
Florida: 9001320 Computer and Network Security Fundamentals (One Credit) Link - Organise and club standards that are closely related or can be covered in one lesson. In this example, I clubbed these standards together as they covered overlapping content (click each tab to see the state standard):
Virginia
Florida
36.0 Solve problems using critical thinking skills, creativity and innovation. – The student will be able to:
36.1 Employ critical thinking skills independently and in teams to solve problems and make decisions.
36.2 Employ critical thinking and interpersonal skills to resolve conflicts.
36.4 Conduct technical research to gather information necessary for decision-making.
39.0 Describe the importance of professional ethics and legal responsibilities. – The student will be able to:
39.1 Evaluate and justify decisions based on ethical reasoning.
39.2 Evaluate alternative responses to workplace situations based on personal, professional, ethical, legal responsibilities, and employer policies.
39.3 Identify and explain personal and long-term consequences of unethical or illegal behaviors in the workplace.Demonstrating Personal Qualities and Abilities
3 Demonstrate initiative and self-direction.
4 Demonstrate integrity.
5 Demonstrate work ethic.
Demonstrating Interpersonal Skills
6 Demonstrate conflict-resolution skills.
7 Demonstrate listening and speaking skills.
8 Demonstrate respect for diversity.
9 Demonstrate customer service skills.
10 Collaborate with team members.
Demonstrating Professional Competencies
11 Demonstrate big-picture thinking.
12 Demonstrate career- and life-management skills.
20 Demonstrate professionalism.
- Finally, use Bloom’s Taxonomy to select level appropriate verbs to create objectives. Once the objectives areready, I picked an appropriate lesson title. This is the final lesson:
Employability Skills
Demonstrate appropriate skills required for a career in cybersecurity.Learning Objectives:- Describe positive work behaviors such as regular attendance, promptness, proper attire, appropriate voice, and pride in work.
- Explain the importance of working in a team and displaying leadership skills.
- Implement conflict resolution skills in different scenarios.
- Employ ethical reasoning while taking decisions.
- Identify alternative responses to workplace situations based on policies, and personal,professional, ethical, and legal responsibilities.
- Identify the consequences of unethical and illegal behaviors at the workplace.
- The finished CO will contain multiple lessons, outlined similar to the one above.
Storyboard
After the CO, comes the task of creating and reviewing storyboards that are production ready. The storyboard is build for each lesson, and closely follows the LOs outlined in the CO. The storyboard details the treatment required in each lesson, including content screens, interaction, assessments, activities, etc. These storyboards are picked up by a production team that consists of graphics designers, articulate developers, video editors, etc. An essential part of a good storyboard is the Notes to Production section. Development notes need to be clear and detailed in order to give the production team a good idea of the required visualisation supplemented by a rough but illustrative mockup.
I decided to base this example storyboard on Conflict Resolution, which covers the objective: Implement conflict resolution skills in different scenarios. I chose to create an animated video detailing various scenarios that could lead to conflict with interactions to show different ways of dealing with this conflict. Click the button below to view the storyboard:
I also picked up the LO: Describe positive work behaviors such as regular attendance, promptness, proper attire, appropriate voice, and pride in work. and created a storyboard showing the treatement of this content using interactions and also storyboared some assessments. Click the button below to view this storyboard:
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