Going Commercial with a Course Curriculum
From ElateWiki
Various university courses have value in the marketplace of trainings. Various corporations have been outsourcing their trainings to educational institutions of higher education for cost-savings and for professionalism. Others request such trainings because of "name" professors. There are numerous ties between public universities and the private sector, and those ties may lead to new shared curricula.
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Fresh Curricular Design for the Professions
Developing a fresh curriculum for the professions is one way that such a curriculum may be created. This means starting out with the business mandate, developing learning objectives, prototyping a learning module or experience, and fine-tuning that for learning value. It means designing hands-on practices. It means possibly working with proprietary e-learning systems within those organizations.
Transitioning an Academic Curriculum
Another approach is to transition an academic curriculum into a commercial one. This means breaking down an online course into its constituent parts and seeing what may even be usable in a professional realm. Often, such courses are subsets of larger curriculums. A modular build may be followed for easier and more flexible delivery. These modules are usually based around particular skills outcomes or topics.
Evolving an academic curriculum means some other changes will be necessary. After all, academic curricula generally is designed for a specific audience, not the general professional one. There are limited "downstream" uses of such curriculums. What other adjustments may be needed? For example, the copyrighted contents used sparingly under "fair use" exemptions cannot be used at all under those terms in a commercial situation (without the cover of the non-profit, accredited educational institution). The language in a curriculum may have to change to a language more commonly used in the professional domain.
Assessments will likely have to be automated and a little more "forgiving" and less stringent than for many academic courses.
And Vice Versa
Adapting a commercial training for academic use seems somewhat easier. Here, a commercial game / course or module may be integrated and contextualized within the larger context of learning. Professors seem to have a fair amount of experience integrating such contents into a curriculum.