Contexts.
Planning any kind of class experience depends on understanding three contexts.
Anyone who has ever attended a professional development seminar at a university teaching centre has heard the mantra about learning outcomes. Learning outcomes have become the alpha and omega of course design, of good teaching, of student-centred learning. Many fans of the idea employ an amended term, “intended learning outcomes.” I know what they’re trying to do there. They’re trying to show that we can’t control all of the learning that takes place, but good instructors will at least enunciate the outcomes around which they’ve designed the course. Frankly, though, “intended” is redundant; no one would ever be able to state “unintended” learning outcomes because, if they’re unintended, they’re not known to us. But I digress.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
At the risk of shocking instructional developers everywhere, I’d like to point out that learning outcomes are important, but they’re only one piece of the puzzle of course design. The slavish devotion to learning outcomes leads to tunnel vision in the instructor. In some ways that might be a good thing, a badly needed corrective for those courses where there might seem to be no clear goal whatsoever.
Suggesting that all course design should flow from the learning outcomes doesn’t take into account a more basic fact. Courses are complex, and assembling one requires making decisions on a variety of matters, big and small. Anyone who teaches knows that there are scores of considerations to take into account when developing a course.
To help make some sense of this complexity, I’ve created a very simple model for sorting through the things we have to consider when designing a course:
Course Context: here an instructor thinks about the course in terms of its role in the program or university, its content, its reputation, its physical or virtual space.
Instructor Context: instructors, either explicitly or implicitly, make decisions regarding their course based on their preferred teaching style, their confidence about the subject matter, the pressures on their time, their levels of stress.
Learner Context: what do we know about our learners in terms of their academic careers, their personal wellbeing, their goals and aspirations, their interests?
These contexts help us sort through the scores of considerations that influence how we design and deliver our courses. Some of these questions we ask ourselves explicitly (do I have enough time to grade three essays, or should I only assign two?), and others reside under the surface, barely visible yet nonetheless present while we put together a syllabus (I know the students in this course struggle with writing, but I don’t really know how to deal with that). The point I’m trying to make here is that if we can spend some time from the outset investigating these contexts in a concerted way, we’ll be much better informed about the kind of course we’re really putting together.
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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