Role: Course Developer

The Course Developer role requires experience-or at a minimum training-in course development. A person playing this role requires a good understanding of the product for which the training material is to be created, and preferably a good understanding of that product from the perspective of the target users' needs.

This training material typically includes instructor presentation slides, student notes, examples, tutorials, and so on to enhance users' understanding of the product.

Skills

The Course Developer role requires experience in courseware development using the chosen medium (e.g. Instructor-lead, Web-based self-learn), and where applicable, this should ideally be supported by in-depth experience delivering training to students. A person playing this role needs to possess a good understanding of how people learn and the different teaching styles that will be required to make the training material effective.

Assignment Approaches

The Course Developer role can be assigned in the following ways:

Assign one or more staff members to perform both the Course Developer and System Analyst roles. This is a commonly adopted approach and capitalizes on the common communication skills that System Analysts share with this role, as well as the domain knowledge that the System Analyst has gained during the Inception and Elaboration phases of the project.
Assign one or more test staff members to perform the Course Developer role only. This works well in large teams, and particularly in situations where there are domain experts available who have significant domain knowledge, enabling them to write and possibly deliver training courses.
Contract the role out to a specialized training developers. This is a common approach to dealing with these responsibilities.

The second strategy can also be used to capitalize on domain knowledge, and where stakeholder domain experts play this role, they will often be more likely to use a courseware style that will suit the culture of the organization.