Modules really are the way to go.

One thing you notice about online course design: there’s a lot of module love. Everyone advocates using modules - “discrete, self-contained learning experiences” - as the basis for almost any online course. Why is it so popular?

It’s not an uncommon feature of any university course to organize the learning into weeks. Many instructors will break down the course week-by-week in their syllabi. And the week is a natural unit of time in a term; in Canada we talk about the term having 12 weeks, so breaking down for the students what they’ll be doing each week makes sense. That thinking in chunks or units seems to have naturally transposed itself to the online environment, perhaps because their distance education predecessor, the correspondence course, was probably structured around the rhythm of a week. Modules can be any length, but it’s not uncommon to see them being a week long.

The benefits of using modular design are many:

• it provides the students with a useful overview of the course organization.

• it’s easier for the instructor to maintain an overview of the course as well.

• it makes updating the course easier - if your modules are based on topics and you want to add or change some topics in the course, you can do so without having to redesign the whole course.

• it’s easier to design the a course by settling on the design of the module, then repeating that for however many modules you want in the course, as opposed to trying to design the whole sweep of a course.

Modules aren’t perfect, however. Their main downside is best communicated with an old question: which came first, the module or the content? Using modules will force the instructor to pull apart and rearrange the content they were planning to teach. Some types of content will lend themselves to this more readily than others. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to force old content into new wineskins, but it will change how the content is perceived by the students, so you have to be sure you want them to view it in that way.

Many also believe that modules should be symmetrical, ie that they should all resemble each other in terms of length, activities, etc. I think this speaks to our desire for harmony and sameness more than to any kind of pedagogical or learning imperative. But as was noted above, consistency of modules across the course makes designing the whole course easier. Wildly different modules in the same course could well be annoying to the learner, however. Another problem is that modules can become over designed with too many elements and activities; course designers gotta design courses, and if the course is modular, then the designer brings all the attention they would have paid to the entire course to bear on the one module, which they then replicate. Caution is urged here; too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing.

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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