divein coaching

Online course frameworks

08 September 2013

Some thoughts about course frameworks we are about to start testing. Of course, this is the product of a series of previous failures, and so consider these to be the product of everything minus what went wrong:

  1. Walk through courses - these are short courses where students simply receive a step-by-step guidance on how to do something. Very little theory and blablabla, just show me how I can master a simple skill. Each mini-course has slides, a video describing the slides, and videos showing how to put the skill to practice. The inspiration for this framework came from Merrienboer's Complex Learning as well as a recent post by the Khan Academy group
  2. Errors and fixes - these are also short courses that will usually follow a walk through course, but where instead of showing how to put something to practice, we show the most common errors where you try the skill out. The errors are immediately followed by the fixes. Inspiration here came primary from the outstanding Before and After series of books and videos by John McWade. I shouldn't forget to mention that Sal Khan's classical mistakes and later fixes when he is explaining math problems were also key in putting this framework together.
  3. Programming in practice - these are short courses on data analysis programming for biomedical researchers. This is specially challenging since most of our existing biomedical researchers consider programming something absolutely alien to their existence. This framework then teaches them to program in the way most programmers do their job, meaning that you grab some working code, play with it, and then adapt that code to your problem. Inspiration for this framework came from a previous collaborator called Aleks Montanha who opened my eyes to this sequence, as well as an absolutely outstanding recent post that describes this sequence (forage, tinker, weld, grow, doubt, and refactor) and what follows in much greater depth

All three frameworks constitute the springboard toward complimentary modules where the content is both enriched and personalized. I have [mentioned in a previous post] about the role of enriched and personalized content. Not much more to add on that area, other than I have been thinking about including something along the lines of role models in terms of enrichment. The idea of role models is that they provide a full template in terms of trajectory, personality, ethics and many other explicit and tacit models that students can then simply follow.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.