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  • The Primacy of Learning Design

    By Joshua Kim March 23, 2010 10:02 pm EDT

    When it comes to effective teaching, good learning design trumps advanced technology every time. Our energy and resources are best spent in partnering with faculty to insure that their courses are designed with solid learning design fundamentals. These fundamentals include:

    a) Courses broken up into units, with units usually (but not always) covering a week of course materials.

    b) Each course unit designed around the number of hours the student is expected to invest for that week. (The standard is 3 hours of outside class time for every hour in class, but this can vary). Each assignment and deliverable is offered within the total time budget for the unit.

    c) A set of learning outcomes for the module. These learning outcomes are relatively short, usually no more than three in total, and contain the core goals that the student will achieve in that week.

    d) The curriculum for the module is included in the unit, with both full-text articles, book chapters and linked video included.

    e) The use of formative, short, low-stakes assessment (usually computer graded) to reinforce the materials.

    f) A set of clearly articulated deliverables that relate both to the learning outcomes and the curriculum for the unit.

    g) Grading rubrics for any deliverables, so students know exactly how they will be assessed.

    h) A focus on collaborative, active assignments - ones that encourage students to work with the materials to share and create knowledge around what we are studying.

    Note that all of the attributes of sound learning design do not require sophisticated technologies. In fact, I usually recommend to the faculty that I work with that they can write-up their modules in a text or Word document. Using tools like a blog, wiki, or discussion board are great - but only if they are done so to support the learning objectives and are utilized within a context of sound learning design.

    The learning management system (LMS) works equally well for on-ground courses as it does for fully online courses. A well designed course does not differ by how it is delivered. Utilizing the LMS to bring students through a narrative experience with the course materials will allow a course to move between online and on-ground.

    Leveraging the LMS to put together a good course requires lots of work at the front-end. A well designed course is complete before the semester begins. Students can view all the course modules, but their work is restricted to the week in which the whole class is working. In my experience, a course that has been fully designed before the first day proceeds smoothly throughout the semester, as faculty can spend their energies interacting and collaborating with the students rather than putting together course materials on the fly.

    Fully online courses, and programs, have the advantage that the LMS is the only classroom available. Online faculty are willing to go through a course design methodology as part of their compensation for preparing to teach online. (Note: I believe that faculty should design their own courses, even if they do so in the context of an established methodology. I've never believed in the practice of faculty teaching a course that they did not develop - although I'd be interested in this debate). Asking faculty who are not teaching online, and who do not receive a course development stipend, to utilize this course design methodology presents other challenges. My hope is that learning technologists working at our colleges and universities find opportunities to develop and scale a course design methodology to encompass as many classes as possible. I'd be curious about how other institutions have been able to increase the number of on-ground courses in which the LMS course site is developed using a course design methodology and checklist.

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Comments on The Primacy of Learning Design

  • Great Article -- Where Is the Interest?
  • Posted by Robert W Tucker , President at InterEd, Inc. on March 24, 2010 at 1:30pm EDT

  • This is a very good article, full of practical advice.

    I cannot help but notice that there are no posts as of yet. If the article were about such shibboleths as academic freedom, administrative compensation, or anything else that threatens the Mandarins, the posts would be running off the page. This article, however, is about effective teaching, purportedly the core business of the professoriate. Where were they?

    Separately, I would add a few considerations to Mr. Kim's list.

    1. Authenticity -- Increasingly, we find that authenticity in activities and assessments produces measurably superior learning.

    2. Horizontal Learning -- While I invented this term in 1986 to describe structured curricular activities in the University of Phoenix, I hope it will gain currency as we apply modern learning sciences to improve the nature and transferability of learning. Mr. Kim addresses this in 'h' but it goes much further. We believe that deep, unforgettable high-transfer learning takes place via structured assignments that take small learning teams (3-5) outside the classroom to the locus of a problem to be solved where the teams gather, analyze, resolve, report, and then communicate their findings back to the other learning teams.

    3. Continuous Low Stakes Assessments -- Mr. Kim addresses this as well. I want to reinforce what I suspect he knows. The ideal course evaluation consists of frequent measures, taken different ways, spanning not only the course objectives but the trans-curricular learning outcomes (communications skills, quantitative reasoning skills, information literacy skills, etc.)

    4. Objectives Mapped to Workshops -- I disagree with Mr. Kim with respect to learning objectives. Three is too few, in part, because structured activities and outcomes need to be built around each objective and you encounter breadth and fidelity problems. We have found that the ideal structured curriculum contains between 10 and 18 learning objectives, each with its suite of adaptive activities, and assessments (metrics and rubrics). This is not an theoretical issue, it is merely the fact that experimentation resulted in this number working better than other options.

    5. An Activity/Assessment Set for Each Objective -- I suggest that each learning objective be paired with not one but a suite of activities specialized to be undertaken in individual, group, passive, active, hi depth, low depth, situations. Each activity should be paired with an assessment appropriate to the activity (often, the activity is the assessment when the rubric is applied).

    6. Validate Assessments -- We do this for a living and I have 25 year's of data to prove that the average test constructed by the average professor would fail an introductory course in measurement science.

    7. Quit Teaching Like Our Great Grand-professors -- I would recommend, as is implied by Mr. Kim's article, that we begin to take advantage of and apply the last 50 years of learning sciences to our teaching behavior. Such application can improve learning while reducing the time spent on task.

    Courses and degrees can be earned sooner with better, not inferior, outcomes. It is shameful that so many among the professoriate earn their living teaching the sciences but completely ignore them in their own profession.

    While technology can substantially assist in the development and management of content ( http://www.intered.com/content-precision/ ), it is by no means an essential component. Everything Mr. Kim and I have suggested can be carried out with pencil and paper. Unfortunately, the typical curriculum in U.S. higher education consists of a 1-page syllabus containing a reading list and a few learning objectives that would fail an introductory course in pedagogy.

    We need more professors to become learners in their teaching role.

  • Well said!
  • Posted by Michael Weiland , Online Learning Group at Arizona State University on March 24, 2010 at 7:15pm EDT

  • Excellent article! Common sense, or course, but it is good to see this type of article out here! Thanks!

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