The biggest obstacle to creating great training applications is not understanding your dependancies. From the top looking down, you have first outside stakeholders. These can be parents, community members, board members, media, or stockholders. Next you have the organizational leadership. These can be the c-suite executives, owner, the sponsors, the end-users. And finally, you have buyer, the subject matter experts, and the development or integration teams. Each level must be be part of a development cycle or loop. Yet each loop has very different dependencies. Most course models ADDIE, SAM do not address these:

• Improve the community loop planning:

  If you don’t include community stakeholders in the process, huge gaps in real-world applicability appear. At the corporate level, end-users may have recently trained technicians that don’t understand their needs. At the public institutions, parents or board members may see a lack of transparency.

• Determine the organizational outcomes:

  The organization has goals that are uniquely different than the buyer of the learning application. In business marketing may need teams trained on a specific software suite, while corporate plans to outsource those skills. In the public sphere, administration has metrics that may not be addressed depending on how assessment is measured in the application.

• The buyer may have limitations to deployment:

  The buyer or lead of a learning application is concerned with their goals and objectives. But they are not aware of platform and library dependencies that may accelerate development but limit usability. Combined with stakeholders that may have learned by lecture or trial and error. The end user may be getting a digital re-hash of poorly thought-out delivery methods.

The solution is the hybrid of agile and waterfall, known as a spiral. And each spiral works in a loop. There are three loops; Community, Organization, and Project Owner. The spiral is an iterative design that uses a risk assessment at each iteration. This combined with hopefully the latest in neuro-cognitive learning science, better educates the user and the stakeholders to your capacity for intelligent collaboration.

Then you go backwards! Using Wiggins and McTighe ‘Backward Design’. First you focus on what is the skill you wish to see in the real-world. Second, what assessment would capture that real-world skill. And then third what content structure would deliver those results?

The triple spiral is understanding the needs at the community, organization, and project owner levels. Each as different expectations and challenges, that as you spiral forward and get risk assessments you identify dependences that might bite. Understanding of course that the faster iterations or interactions are at the project owner / development loop, slower at the organization, and even more intermediate at the community level.