Content.
Why do some instructional designers have a hate on for course content?
When educational developers and instructional designers talk about content in online courses, they are often referring to the stuff of a course, in particular the readings/viewings of the course, the lectures, and the learning activities (but not the assessments) associated with that stuff.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
At the same time, we instructors, the content “experts,” think of content as the object of our expertise - not so much the physical form of the stuff of the course (the paper textbook or the online journal article or the video file), but the actual information and knowledge contained therein.
In their book Teaching Online at its Best, Linda Nilson and Ludvika Goodson have a section entitled "How Content Becomes the Wrong Driver." They’re referring to both kinds of content in this section; they want less of the former, yet they’re also skeptical about the latter. Here's an excerpt (with emphasis added by me):
Students cite many reasons for dropping out of online courses, including the irrelevance and inapplicability of the content (Chyung & Vachon, 2013; Levy, 2006; Park & Choi, 2009). Dense content becomes a barrier to significant learning because it leaves too little time for an instructor to show its relevance and build in opportunities for students to apply it. Typically, content coverage balloons because of faculty’s genuine passion for their field of expertise and their desire to share this with students. Content grows “like the mythical Hydra of Greek legend” with “two more heads growing in place of each head that is cut off, making it a very difficult monster to tame” (Monahan, 2015, ¶1). Where is there time for comprehension in the course? Where does the development of critical analysis and problem-solving skills fit in? Encyclopedic content coverage leaves little wiggle room for this higher-value, higher-order learning (Florida Department of Education, Bureau of Curriculum and Instruction, 2008). We teach a lot of content that will not matter much in students’ lives, that is not life-worthy, that has no authentic purpose or meaning in the real world (Burkholder, 2014; Perkins, 2014). Consequently, students end up with only “acquaintance knowledge” (Perkins, 2014, p. 33). What is the point of teaching just content when so much of it is readily accessible without taking a college course? For example, anyone can quickly find even trivial information on the Internet, such as the name for the “dot over the letter i” (Perkins, 2014, p. 34). The Internet tells us it is a tittle, which also appears over the letter j. How relevant is this factoid to significant learning?
For those of us who don’t know or care that much about typesetting and font creation, I suppose knowing the definition of a tittle is a factoid. But for those teaching and studying such things, this is likely quite useful information, and it’s a shame that the authors are so snarky about it. There’s a great deal of information about pedagogy on the internet, too; why did the authors feel the need then to write a textbook on teaching? It’s easy to be dismissive of things about which we know nothing, but it’s distressing to see educators ridicule knowledge and information.
Their mockery is rooted in the idea that “we teach a lot of content that will not matter much in students’ lives, that is not life-worthy, that has no authentic meaning and purpose in the real world.” There are a number of things one can say about this, but I’ll limit myself to one main criticism. To think that there must be a directly observable relationship between course content and students’ lives reflects a limited and impoverished worldview. If we followed this rule strictly, it would eliminate a lot of university programs. You’re not a German citizen? Don’t study German. You’ll never go to the moon? Forget physics. You don’t live in the past? Then taking history courses will be a waste of time.
The authors argue that “we need to think differently about content and shift our focus from covering it to getting students to use it,” and they quote Gagné and Merrill to support this argument: “placing student learning outcomes in the context of real-world problems gives purpose and meaning to knowledge and skills.” This makes more sense; having students develop the ability to work with what they’re learning is necessary, and too much content within a course can limit the time available to learners to process, absorb, make connections with, and apply that new learning. But the language of real-world problems is a real turn-off since it negates in one stroke curiosity-based learning and research, giving more ammunition to funding agencies and governments to turn universities into training schools for business and industry (which I assume is what they mean by the real world? Who knows, it’s such a useless phrase.). But at the same time, to think knowledge is only valuable when it has a “purpose” suggests that we can forecast which knowledge is worth attaining because we know for which purpose it will be required. If it were true that we could see into the future, the lotteries would be out of business.
Utilitarianism in education can be extremely limiting for human creativity and discovery. It’s best not to restrict education to this very narrow path.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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