Friday, August 31, 2007

Designing Reference Hybrids vs. Online courses

A good post here from Tony Karrer on his elearningtech blog. I'm in the midst of designing a course these days, and have been challenged with what to leave out! I've got gobs of material, but know that no one really cares or can make any real use of the material if it's spewed out all at once. Karrer writes about trends toward creating "Reference Hybrids" vs. creating "courses". The trend is toward shorter modules or nuggets vs. whole online courses. I like, and buy into the concept, but don't yet have many good models in mind.

I don't know if it's my own training in the old model, or if it's the university systems (or both) that seem to push against this approach--A proper online course should at least be equivalent in "rigor" (read seat time, amount of content) to a F2F course.

This idea of small portions of learning has been in the literature for years (job aids, just in time learning), but somehow now it seems to be really taking hold in higher education--at least in my own design efforts. Read Karrer's full post.
-JG

No comments:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.