Reduce Your Stress: Visual Mapping Guides Content Conversion and Repurposing

Arguments andconcerns such as budgetary restrictions, resource constraints, and business prioritiesmay make it impractical to start from scratch on every project. Frequently, trainingspecialists, instructional designers, and media specialists receive requests ordirections from their managers or their customers to use existing content andexisting course assets when creating a new product or making enhancements toexisting assets. This can seem daunting, but it need not be so.

Seventypercent of my instructional-design projects require rebuilding courses from onemodality and one specific purpose to a different type of modality, purpose, andaudience. This tip will explain my process for approaching these projects.

Most of my update projects involve conversion of contentfrom a retail product to an academic product. Our retail products are primarilyself-led and involve one assessment at the end of the course for a certainnumber of continuing education credits (CEUs). Retail products typicallyinclude two major element types (modules and conclusions) and several sub-elements,specifically:

• Modules
  • PDF Text
  • One presentation
  • One 10-question review quiz

• Course conclusion
  • One practice exam
  • One final exam (must be passed with a score of 70percent for CEU achievement)

Academic products have more depth and must meet different specifications.Typically, these courses are for secondary, vocational, or higher educationinstitutions. They have standard requirements, contact-hour requirements, and aneed to include more experience; additionally, they need to have flexibledelivery modalities for individual schools.

In both cases, retail and academic, the content may be in theform of various physical or digital media. At the start of the conversionprocess, the media are not a consideration, only the instructional nature ofthe content.

To achieve the transition, one of the first steps in my conversionprocess is to identify or “map” what exists currently in the retail productcompared to what must appear in the academic product. In the example for thisarticle (Figure 1), I have used a simple template to map the existing items inModule One of a typical retail product. The template can be a form on paper, ora spreadsheet or table in an online document.

Figure 1: Mapping from a retail product to an academic product

Module One has one hour and five minutes of student contact(gray highlighted line) in its retail form. The revised (academic) course must providefive hours per instructional module. The template allows a designer to visuallymap out and provide brief details for the items that will need to be added tothe module in its academic form.

Here are some of the considerations that we need to incorporatein the academic version of this course:

• Contact hours (five)
• Learning strategy for in-person, hybrid, or onlinedelivery
• Ease of use for instructors
• Resources for students
• Development of concepts
• Formative and summative assessment opportunities
• What we need to create
• How can we create it cost effectively andsupport the learning strategy?

The second section in the template (marked with the bluefill in the header row) shows the original outline of Module One. The thirdsection (marked with purple fill in the header) indicates the revised Module One.The red text in the third section identifies the additional assets needed tomeet the academic requirements; the third section also indicates the time,delivery requirements, and notes about the resources. 

As mentioned, this is the first step of this process. Theobjective is simply to identify the goal and requirements, and the templatehelps to visually outline and organize these specifications. After each modulehas been successfully mapped (Figure 1 shows one module only), the next step isto identify more specific requirements for each asset. For example, the besttext for this particular course should read at an eighth grade level and havecorresponding outlines to the text. The asset requirements become more specificin the second step of the process.