From Concept to Content: A Deep Dive into Theorizing and Planning a Lab Collection

The decision process

When creating new content, the first step is deciding what to commit to. We consider:

• User demand: Are users frequently requesting a specific topic?
• Evolving landscapes: Is there new technology or industry trends we should cover?
• Internal analysis: Do our cyber experts have unique insights not found elsewhere?
• Overarching goals: Is the content part of a larger initiative like AI security?
• Regulations and standards: Can we teach important regulations or standards?
• Cyber competency frameworks: Are we missing content from frameworks like NICE or MITRE?

After considering these points, we prioritize one idea for creation and refinement. Lower-priority ideas are added to a backlog for future use. 

Feasibility and outcomes

Having a concrete idea is just the beginning. Over the years, we’ve learned that understanding the desired outcomes is crucial in planning.

Our core mission is education. We ensure that each lab provides a valuable learning experience by setting clear learning objectives and outcomes.

We ask ourselves, “What should users learn from this content?” This ranges from specific outcomes, like “A user should be able to identify an SQL Injection vulnerability”, to broader skills, like “A user should be able to critically analyze a full web application”. Listing these outcomes ensures accountability and fulfillment in the final product.

Setting clear learning objectives involves defining what users will learn and aligning these goals with educational frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy. This taxonomy categorizes learning into cognitive levels, from basic knowledge and comprehension to advanced analysis and creation. This ensures our content meets users at their level and helps them advance.

Turning big topics into bite-sized chunks

Once a topic is selected, we must figure out how to break down huge subject areas into digestible chunks. This is a fine balance; trying to cram too much information into one lab can be overwhelming, while breaking the subject down too much can make it feel disjointed.

One good approach is to examine the learning objectives and outcomes set out in the first step, map them out to specific subtopics, and finally map those to labs or tasks. For example, consider this theoretical set of learning outcomes for a Web scraping with Python lab collection.

• A user should understand what web scraping is and when it’s useful.
• A user should be able to make web requests using Python.
• A user should be able to parse HTML using Python.
• A user should understand what headless browsers are and when to use them.
• A user should be able to use a headless browser to parse dynamic content on a webpage.

These outcomes can be mapped into two categories: theory outcomes (“A user should understand”) and practical outcomes (“A user should be able to”). Understanding the difference between these two is useful, as a few things can be derived from it – for example, whether to teach a concept in a theory (heavy on theoretical knowledge without providing a practical task) or practical (teaching a concept and exercising it in a practical environment) lab. Using this, the outline for a lab collection can start to take shape, as seen in the table below.

Each learning objective is assigned to a lab to ensure thorough and user-friendly coverage. Often, multiple objectives are combined into one lab based on subtopic similarity and the total number of labs in a collection. The above example illustrates the process, but extensive fine-tuning and discussion are needed before finalizing content for development. 

Next time…

In part two of this mini-series, you’ll read about the next stage of the content development process, which involves laying the technical foundations for a lab collection.

Don't miss the Series…

You can opt to receive an alert when part two of this series is released, by “following” activity in The Human Connection Blog using the bell at the top of this page. In the meantime, feel free to drop any questions about the content creation process in the replies. Are there any parts of the planning process you want to know more about?