Farther up the workflow stream, of course, you could design an application with good prompts, intelligent defaults, embedded references, etc., etc., as a form of performance support. Airline pricing is complicated; Southwest’s display of prices for your itinerary is not.

Farther down the workflow stream, the test of the loosely joined job aids would be: can I find them with a minimum of effort, and can I use them on the job to accomplish my task?

The quibble (and it’s mostly a quibble) is that if the learner sees the job aid as stored in “the course,” she’s got to remember where the course is and where the job aid is inside that wrapper.

But certainly you could both embed the job aids within a course and then make explicit an easy way to retrieve them, aiming for that within-three-clicks ideal.

I’m thinking in particular of a project I’m currently working on — short software training courses, small nuggets of info, demos with titles like “How to…”, some embedded practice and interactivity…

It’s a blended course/job aid.

My quick description of a job aid is something you use on the job that tells you what to do and when to do it.

So, for example, I’d call a software wizard a job aid. So’s a recipe, or a help file showing you how to use Excel’s AutoFilter feature.

I’m reluctant to say a course is a job aid, though mostly I’m hanging up on terminology. Course = instruction; job aid = performance guide.

I can imagine a course built around the use of job aids. E.g., a sales rep course with one topic being “searching for prospects.” The task: enter queries into your customer database based on certain factors so you can identify prospects for additional products or services.

In the sales course (in person, online, whatever) you’d have had demonstration, interactivity, practice, likely centered around a job aid.

The job aid would have a clear title like “How to Search the Customer Database.” If I had an online set of such job aids, I wouldn’t have to go back to the (instructional) course if I didn’t feel like it. The job aid could of course contain a link to a detailed example — making the job aid effective both as a memory jogger (ah, yes, I have to do x, y, and z) and as a worked example.