Designing Sustainable and Scalable Courses
Researchers at the Open University in the UK have been pioneering the design of courses that are sustainable and scalable. They have found several advantages to designing courses in small, reusable sections: this type of learning design can help support activity or problem-based learning; interactivity and collaborative work and learner diversity, choice and selection within a Virtual Learning Environment (Mason, 2003). We look at each of these advantages in turn and then consider the 7-step model of sustainable course design.
Problem-based reflective learning
Firstly, let's consider supporting problem-based reflective learning. A common problem in student group projects is poor critical reflection and project planning. Students are inexperienced in assigning roles to group members and timetabling activities. One approach to tackle this issue is for you to ask students to provide a weekly account of the progress of their project. The problem with paper based, group portfolios is that not all students within a group may have equal access to the portfolio at any given time. This is less likely to be an issue if students construct an online, reflective log within the VLE (provided students have online access). You can guide your students in designing and structuring their reflective log. It can be arranged as a series of sections, outlining: information about the project team; a repository of digital assets related to the project; a week-by-week progress report; a literature review; and links to external sites. You will be able to keep track of the students' work and identify poor progress, which can then be discussed with the students by email or face-to-face. Each student group can then take steps to reflect upon how to address the problem and draw up a new action plan. This has been shown as an effective way of supporting student reflection. You may be interested in reading the article by Stefani, Clarke and Littlejohn (2000) in the references for this section.
Students' collaborative work
Secondly, you may want to support students' collaborative work. Shared workspaces and digital repositories integrated within the VLE can allow students to store and share a variety of materials useful to collaborative group projects. The students can arrange their own resources into an informal shared workspace, to be easily accessed, repurposed, reflected upon and reused. There is increasing emphasis on students collecting electronic learning materials and creating assignments in a digital format, uploading these resources to a repository and sharing these resources with tutors and peers. Work is already underway to explore not only how to document ideas arising from student assignments, but the process by which their ideas were developed. This may be achieved by capturing unwritten thoughts and courses of action as metadata. You may be interested in reading the book chapter by Littlejohn (2004) - in the references for this section.
Learner diversity
Finally, designing courses in small chunks can help improve learner diversity, choice and selection. For example, if you present your students with chunks of learning resources in a variety of formats (e.g. video, text, etc) they can choose a resource format that best suits their learning style (e.g. visual, abstract, etc). Alternatively, students with special needs or specific learning styles can select materials that best support their learning. Tutors at the Open University have found that chunks of materials that have been written with a particular student culture in mind can be rewritten and replaced with materials more appropriate for another culture. For more information, read the chapter by Thorpe et al (2003) in the references section.
