Course Design Lessons to be learned from the Evolution of the Wheel – Why you might need a covered wagon to take your content to the prairies of the future

Course Design Lessons to be learned from the Evolution of the Wheel – Why you might need a covered wagon to take your content to the prairies of the future.

The first distance education courses were correspondence courses – A correspondence course is pictured below for reference:

Its main characteristics –

• It doesn’t really break down 
• It has no moving pieces and
• the only way to improve it is through a LOT of manual effort.

Over time the distance education course has evolved and grown, along with the associated technologies, as seen below.

Early on they were rigid and inflexible, however, the designers were limited to the roads that they were designed for.

The first correspondence courses are like the stone wheel – rigid and once out on the road they were not going to break down or be able to be adjusted.

Advancements in delivery technology led us to:

Spokes! – in this analogy, the spokes are the reinforced contact points between the content and the learner. Instead of a correspondence course where the learner is directly responsible for every contact point with the content.

Think of a 15-week course as having at least 15 spokes – a contact point between the content (the wheel) and the delivery method (the road) which helps get the learner arrive at their destination – the future. 🙂

As the associated technologies evolved so did the options and most utilized choices were heavily invested in (because of the Industrialization of Education – the constant stifling of variations).

The contact points are reinforced with additional assistance from new technologies – Grade Warning Systems, Attendance tracking, Automated communication and feedback from Publisher Content, etc.

You end up with mass-produced wheels that are amazing – for what they are specifically designed for. If you have learners that don’t learn the material in the ways that it is presented and supported – all additional guidance will need to come from somewhere – probably the most adjacent individual to the learner – aka YOU.

Mostly this is great for most of the content that needs to be learned most of the time. However, when this becomes a problem is when the technology associated with a particular lesson is NOT the most currently available industrialized option. You either need to acquire an expensive and highly specialized wheel or use what you have and hope for the best. 

Off-roading with your digital tires will guarantee you get stuck in the virtual mud. 

You may be saying to yourself right now – “What the hell is he talking about?”

Don’t worry, I am going to make it all make sense now (maybe)

Let’s say you need to work on specific software that is not network capable, for various reasons:

• limited machine install options,
• dev environments that require specific settings not allowed on the network,
• plain and simple OLD programs that need virtual environments, or old hardware to even function anymore!

Congratulations – you need a covered wagon to reach these plains!

Covered wagon – it has wheels that you can replace yourself! –

but you might have trouble finding premanufactured options. Custom coding and setup should be expected by the teacher and the learner.

Covered wagon – It is designed to function even without electricity and modern roads!

but if you use it on modern roads you will be embarrassed by the other cars on the road. Seemingly “backwards” evolutionary choices in technology should be chosen for very specific and insurmountable issues.