How Do You Take a Document and Transform It Into a Training Product?

Written guides and handbooks like those produced by the National Forum on Education Statistics and the What Works Clearinghouse provide a wealth of information, examples, and best practices that can serve as the foundation for professional development. These content-rich documents can be used to inform trainings that give learners another way to engage with and apply content.

Creating a training—especially an interactive learning experience—from a document requires more than transferring written content into a new format. It requires thinking differently about what learners need to know, what they need to be able to do, and how they can engage with and apply the information.

QIP has a long history of collaborating with federal, state, and local education learners to develop best practice guides and other documents and use those resources as the foundation for training. The Forum Guide to Data Visualization: A Resource for Education Agencies and the Data Visualization Online Course, developed through QIP’s work with the National Forum on Education Statistics, provides one example of how a comprehensive written resource can become a focused learning experience.

QIP’s approach is based on the fundamentals of instructional design, such as the steps in the ADDIE framework (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) and ensures the training complements information presented in the written document. Beyond the basic steps of instructional design, there are additional steps and considerations when turning a document into a training.

Step 1: Identify What Learners Need to Know and Be Able to Do

The first step isn't asking, "How do we turn this document into a course?" Instead, ask,"What should learners know or be able to do after completing the training?"

A written document can provide comprehensive information that learners return to as questions arise. A training needs to guide learners toward specific, measurable learning objectives, what a learner will know and be able to accomplish by the end of instruction. All content in the course must support the learning objectives.

The Forum Guide to Data Visualization provides information about how education agencies can use data visualization to communicate information accurately and effectively. QIP’s instructional designers worked with state and local agency data practitioners to understand learners and their learning needs and identify the learning objectives. This approach helped ensure that the training’s lessons and activities are tailored to the audience and build upon information from the written document.

Step 2: Distill the Information into Essential Concepts

Once learning objectives are established, identify the information learners need to achieve them.

This isn't simply a matter of shortening the document. Instructional designers need to decide what should become core instruction, what can become an example or activity, and what can remain in the original document as a reference.

For example, the Forum Guide to Data Visualization identifies four key principles of effective data visualization: showing the data, reducing clutter, integrating graphics and text, and portraying data accurately and ethically as core instructional concepts. These concepts were prioritized while other information such as background information on the development of data visualization, were left in the text as reference. This highlights the most actionable information for learners.

Step 3: Turn Information into a Learning Sequence

To develop the sequence of a training, instructional designers need to determine when learners encounter information and what they do with it next. Storyboarding can help map content, visuals, activities, and interactions before development begins.

The first course of the Data Visualization series illustrates this distinction. Learners begin by exploring what data visualization is before moving into principles for effective visualization and the six-step process for developing a visualization. The course then brings these ideas together through an example using education data.

The progression moves learners from:

Understand the concept → Learn the principles → Learn the process → See the process applied

Rather than reproducing the document's structure, the course creates a learning journey from its content.

Step 4: Turn Ideas and Information into Examples and Practice

Training also creates opportunities to demonstrate and practice ideas that a written document primarily explains.

This is particularly useful for data visualization. Reading a recommendation to "reduce clutter," for example, is different from completing an activity that demonstrates how unnecessary visual elements interfere with a visualization's message. Similarly, guidance about tailoring a visualization to its audience becomes more concrete when learners consider how information might be presented differently for different stakeholders.

When reviewing a document for potential training content, ask:

• Could learners see this principle demonstrated?
• Could they make a decision about it?
• Could they practice applying it?

A written recommendation might become an example to evaluate, a scenario requiring a decision, an interactive graphic, or a knowledge check. The goal isn't to add interaction for its own sake, but to give learners meaningful ways to work with the content.

Step 5: Move From Understanding to Application

A strong training helps learners bridge the gap between understanding a concept and using it themselves.

The Data Visualization course makes this shift between its courses. After the first course establishes foundational concepts, course two focuses on applied data visualization. Learners explore the use of data visualization in education, consider data visualization within their own organizations, and examine recommended practices.

This progression allows the course to establish a shared foundation before asking learners to connect the material to their professional context.

Course developers can use a similar progression by asking: What does the learner need to understand first? What can they practice next? How can they connect that learning to their own work?

Step 6: Build Opportunities to Check Understanding

A course should also give learners structured opportunities to check their understanding.

The first module of the Data Visualization course concludes with an assessment tied to its foundational concepts, principles, processes, and examples.

Assessments and knowledge checks should connect directly to the learning objectives and reinforce the knowledge or skills the training was designed to develop.

Step 7:  Review the Course as Its Own Product

While the training should be complementary to the original document, it should also exist as a standalone product. If the training is meant to be used independently from the document, it should be treated as a distinct product with its own development and review process.

Practitioner review can help ensure examples are realistic, activities are useful, instructions are clear, and the training connects to learners' day-to-day work.

One Source, Different Ways to Learn

Transforming a document into a training doesn't mean replacing the original resource, nor does it mean simply replicating it. It gives learners another way to engage with and apply its content.

The document remains a detailed reference, while the course creates a focused experience that sequences essential concepts, demonstrates their application, and checks understanding.

The difference between the two illustrates an important principle for developing training from written resources: don't simply ask how to put the document online. Ask what learners should be able to take from the document—and design an experience that helps them get there.