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| What should a course teach? The answer, of course, is whatever will have the most positive impact on the skills the course was designed to target. Most organizations, however, lack a systematic way of determining what that is. Lacking a clear-cut way to prioritize, they often opt to maximize "coverage" by, for example, teaching everything that any SME thinks is important for any reason. |
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| Unfortunately, this approach results in bloated courses that cover many topics at a shallow level rather than covering the most important topics deeply. |
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| Critical Mistake Analysis (CMA) is a proprietary methodology that helps organizations and training departments take a fact-based approach in deciding what to teach. |
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| CMA methodology takes an empirical approach to identify the most important issues that a course should focus on. By identifying the most common and costly mistakes made by novices deploying target skills in the real world, and performing a root-cause analysis to determine the underlying causes of these mistakes, CMA tells you exactly what content will have the most significant business impact. |
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| CMA methodology evolved from extensive research conducted at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences. NIIT and Cognitive Arts have proven the value of this approach in numerous client engagements across a variety of industries and content areas. |
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| CMA is a five-step process: |
| The first step is to identify the mistakes that novices executing targeted skills make. This information is gathered through a combination of surveys, interviews, and on-the-job observations, combined with whatever operational data is available. |
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