Words matter to me. My former students can attest to this fact. My writing tends to be more verbose—okay, it is more verbose—than others because I want to be clear about what it is that I’m trying to convey, and statements that sound like absolutes are simply not acceptable (unless they are). See what I did there? Somewhere in the Interwebs, an editor sighed heavily and my ex-students nodded in recognition.
Given that…
I don’t like using the word “course” when thinking about online (or hybrid) learning unless it’s absolutely necessary. It limits people to their preconceived notions of what a course is. It’s a term that is burdened with meaning by each person’s lived history. This burden anchors thinking (unnecessarily, I believe), and all decisions end up being incremental changes from that initial position:
- A person in the role of “teacher” controls the class
- The course is separated into “days”
- Learning proceeds sequentially
- The teacher defines what happens on each day
- “Students” learn from the teacher
- Students complete “assignments” as a means of validating that they have learned
- “Grades” are assigned to students as a means of measuring both absolute and relative student performance
- Grade distributions are used to measure teaching quality
And so on. If one were to be asked about how to create amazing online learning but used “course” as a beginning point, then the process would involve going through each of the points above and creating something seemingly equivalent, or marginally different, but that would be delivered digitally.
We can do better. We don’t want to film a play and call it a movie. This isn’t how one ends up with either Avatar or Minecraft.
Criticizing an idea without offering a solution isn’t much more than whining (as my dad pointed out frequently). Therefore, I propose that “digital experience” is a much more useful term. It means almost nothing to listeners other than “that lived event or process which is experienced online”. I’ll explore this term in a future post.
