Microsoft material accelerates (but does not replace) process of curriculum development

Since I was hoping to have lesson plans completed by mid-August, my goal for this past week was to complete through lesson 14, which represents roughly half the curriculum.  Midway through the week, however, I found something on the Internet that considerably altered the path to my project goal and forced me to completely revise my goal plan for the next three weeks.

What I found was Unlimited Potential, a computer basics curriculum published by Microsoft in some 20 different languages, including Hindi.  Essentially, the MSUP curriculum is hundreds of pages of step-by-step instructions on how to use MS Office programs compiled into a downloadable textbook.  The key advantage: no translation necessary.

 My initial reaction was that this find basically rendered useless all work I had already done and was planning to do.  After all, how could I refuse this wealth of Hindi-medium, Microsoft-authored course material?

 But what I discovered after reviewing the curriculum is that, in terms of scope, order, and depth of content, it suffers from many of the same problems I identified in the other (English) curricula that I assessed in my first two weeks of work here.  In addition, the lessons are nothing more than a textbook plus some helpful hints, and the exercises are few and superficial.

 I also realized that blindly implementing the Unlimited Potential model here in Bagar would not align with the mission of GDL to innovate and test new solutions.  For the past month, GDL Technology has been working to construct a world class curriculum founded on very specific objectives, and it does not make sense to me to now abandon the curriculum we have worked so hard to design.

 My task, then, has simply changed.  Instead of writing lesson plans from scratch, I am taking MSUP excerpts as raw material, and rearranging sections, trimming down detail, adding additional content, etc., to make them conform to our curriculum outline.  That way, the grunt work of translating is eliminated, while the novelty of our rigorously developed curriculum is preserved.  I will also be continuing to write practical exercises, as the focus of the GDL Technology course remains job-oriented skills transfer.