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So in this video, I’m going to show you how to create the course syllabus for a technical course, we’re going to use a Cybersecurity Awareness course as an example. So if you are working in it, you worked in information security, you might be have been responsible for putting together a Cybersecurity Awareness Program for your company. And so you might have some experience putting together a course syllabus. 

So let’s take what you already know, and maybe what you don’t know. And let’s talk about what it takes to put together a course syllabus for somewhat of a technical type of topic. So I’m going to share my screen with you here. And so the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to think about the end in mind. So we’re gonna have the end in mind. So what is it that we want our students, it might be employees, it might be whoever is purchasing your course. You know, what is it that we want them to do? 

So if we’re going to create a Cybersecurity Awareness Program, we’re just going to create one course for program in a in a Cybersecurity Awareness Program, you might have multiple courses. So but in this video, I’m just going to, we’re just going to take one as an example. And we’re going to create a course about fishing. 

Okay, so what we want to do is we want to think about what is the end in mind? What is it that we want our learners to either know, do or feel when they are finished with our course. Alright, so rather than give, you know, write a course about absolutely everything there ever could possibly need to know about fishing, it’s really, you know, what is it that we want to learn to know how to do? So first of all, let’s identify who our learners are to begin with. 

This is very important, because when you’re talking about a topic like phishing, phishing is going to be very different for Cybersecurity Awareness training for you know, a receptionist somebody who works at accounting, you know, somebody like that, or somebody who is working in cybersecurity, and you’re, they’re trying, you’re, you’re showing them and you’re, you’re teaching them how to do investigative tasks that go with when when phishing emails come in, right? So it’s, it’s going to look very different. 

So you want to identify who your students are. So who are your students? So in this example, here, we’re going to say it’s employees of Acme Acme company, right? And we’re going to say this is about a 500. person company, right? So those are my students. So I’m going to really just give them an overview of what is an awareness of phishing, right? So when they are finished with my course, what is it that I want them to? What is the transformation I want them to have had? So you can look at? What are they? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do? Or what do you want them to feel or some combination of those three. 

So what I’m going to do here is say I want them to know how to identify a possible phishing email. And I want them to be able to this is the do be able to report a phishing email to the infosec. department. I can’t type today when people are watching me, right. So we’re going to use up the two things that I want them to do, you can really have as many as you need to have, for a course just know that the more sort of learning objectives, that’s what these are, these are learning objectives, the more learning objectives you have, the longer your course is going to be. 

And so you really want to make sure that you are refining the scope of what it is that you want to be able to that you want to have in this course. So then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take these two topics, and I’m going to create what might be called units or chapters or modules for my, for my course. Alright, so in the first section here is know how to identify a phishing email. 

So the first one might be is, you know, looking at sender information. And then the next one might be, were you expecting this email? and so on. So you could do you know, as many of these as you need, right? And then you go down here, be able to report a phishing email to the infosec team. It’s you know, how to report in Outlook, how to contact the IRS team. We might have, you know, the email, you know, phone number, etc, and so on, right. Okay. So These become our modules. 

Alright, so these, these are what we might call, you know, these are our learning objectives, these might be called the domains. These are the high level topics, high level things that the students need be able to do when they’re finished with the course. Right? So then down here is these are going to be my individual modules. And you might have two modules, you might have one module, you might have five modules, it’s up to you, it’s you, you are the creator of this course, you’re helping your students have a transformation, right? So then down here, what I’m going to do is I’m going to start filling in this is what the individual lessons are going to be, right. So we’re going to, you know, we’re going to show them how to how to look at sender email address. 

We’re going to look for misspellings, spellings and email address, and so on. Right. So now, these right here become my individual lessons. And so what you want to do is, if you’re developing a video based course that you want people to actually sit down and pay attention to and go through, what you want to do is you want to create short three to five minute no more than seven minute videos on how to look at the sender’s email address. Okay, the next thing, the next video will be, you know, a lesson on how to, you know, looking at the misspellings and email addresses the ways that, you know, they try to spoof email addresses, things like that, right. 

So you’re going to break these down in to individual lessons. And the idea here is that when you’re creating a video based course that people can work through on their own, you want them to really just, you know, have have short digestible videos that they can use. So again, three to five minutes, no more than seven minutes to get people to listen to it. So this is really just a very quick way that you can put together a course syllabus, there’s a lot more that goes into curriculum design, instructional design, that sort of thing. But as you’re getting started, you’re putting together a course so that you are not getting you so overwhelmed with you’re not overwhelming your students either. This is exactly how you can come up with a course, a course syllabus. 

So now what you want to do after you have all of this filled in, so maybe you’ve you’ve come up with five different domains. Each domain has, you know, seven different modules underneath it each, each module has three to five lessons that go with it right, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to go back, and you’re going to look at it some more. And you’re gonna say, all right, well, you know, are there any topics that you could combine? Are there any things that you could take, so D and E and F right here, they’re kind of the same here? Well, we can combine those into one lesson, make one video regarding that that can easily be three to five minutes, that’s digestible by our learners. So you’re going to go back and you’re going to start, you know, fitting out all the things that are in there that either can be combined.

 And then also make sure you’re you’re keeping your learning objectives in take those into consideration when you were when you’re doing some of your editing here. So again, the point here is to do phishing, phishing training for your, for your end users, and users, right. So you want the students to know how to identify a possible phishing email, we want to be able to, we wanted to teach them how to report a phishing email to the infosec team. But then if you’ve got something in there, you know about, you know, your your Wi Fi router at home, and you know, getting on the VPN, and all this kind of stuff that maybe it’s beyond the scope of what it is that you want your learner’s to do, you can start taking that kind of stuff out. I always say though, don’t take it out and delete it forever. Just take it out and save it put it aside for another course because you have some other great ideas for another course there that might be that might be a little bit more appropriate for the learning objectives of that individual course. 

So this is a very quick, simple way for you to put together a course syllabus that doesn’t get scope creep, that you are staying on topic, you’re keeping it direct to the point and helping your students have the transformation that that you want them to have.