Course Design for Online and Blended Learning

Course Design for Online and Blended Learning

Choosing the right sequence of tasks when designing an online course involving group collaboration.

In our previous post, we looked at how important engagement is for our students when they are completing collaborative online tasks. In this post, we take a second look at motivation from a course design perspective. How can we ensure that collaborative group activities are effectively integrated throughout an entire course, and what can we do to make sure our students remain motivated?

Vygotsky’s ZPD

To tackle this question, a great place to start is with concept that was developed nearly 100 years ago by a Soviet psychologist and social constructivist named Lev Vygotsky. Focusing on early childhood development, Vygotsky established a tool for understanding the learning potential of young learners. He noted that a child’s mental development progresses at a unique pace, and that there is a limit to the capacity of a child to complete tasks under the guidance of a teacher. This capacity was denoted as the Zone of Proximal Development, which Vygotsky defined as the “distance between the actual developmental level by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). As a result, the ability to acquire a specific skillset in a learning environment varies from one student to another. When tasks are assigned within the ZPD, they can be acquired with the help of a teacher or peer. When tasks fall outside the ZPD, they cannot.

The concept of scaffolding is often used as an analogy to explain the Zone of Proximal Development. As a structure is being built, scaffolding facilitates the construction process. This scaffolding, however, is only temporary, providing support until the structure is able to stand on its own. Once it can stand on its own, the scaffolding can be dismantled. Without the scaffolding, the structure cannot be built; conversely, with scaffolding the structure can grow and develop.

In education, scaffolding refers to the removal of some of the barriers to accomplishing a task, so that a learner can focus on performing in tandem what cannot be achieved alone. This scaffolding is employed tentatively, with the aim to help the learner to achieve the same level of success independently in the future. This may take the form of instruction and explanations, providing hints and modelling, or asking guiding questions (Pol, Volman, & Beishuizen, 2010).

Vygotsky’s ZPD and Group Collaboration

With an understanding of Vygotsky’s ZPD, the benefits of group collaboration become more apparent. Since our learners’ abilities are out of sync with their peers, they have differing skillsets and areas in need of improvement. These discrepancies become salient as our students are asked to collaborate, and as they work towards a common goal, they can mutually transfer their knowledge to each other.

This has several benefits. Firstly, apart from the range of advantages listed in our previous post, we can see that group collaboration acts as an equalizer, and that even our ‘strongest’ students stand to benefit from their peers. Furthermore, collaboration allow our students to rise to and overcome challenges that they could never face alone.

We should remember, however, that not all collaborative tasks are equally effective for our students. As can be seen in the figure below, there is a small window of opportunity for the transfer of knowledge among group members. Firstly, tasks need to be designed so that they fall with the learners’ ZPDs. When tasks are too easy, the learners will lose interest, and when tasks are beyond the learners’ ZPDs, they will not be able to achieve them successfully. Moreover, tasks should be selected which require skills that fall within the ZPDs of some learners, yet are also core competencies of some of their peers. This combination beckons the assistance of ‘experts’ and allows for optimal learning transfer among collaborative groups (Borthwick and Jones, 2003).

Vygotsky’s ZPD and Course Design

Vygotsky’s ZPD can be a helpful tool for making decisions about which collaborative tasks to include and how to organize them within an online or blended course. According to Vygotsky’s ZPD, we can see that gaining proficiency in a subject area is an emergent, rather than linear process. Learners improve through social interaction with a better other; they learn by solving problems in tandem with experts, and as a result acquire the ability to accomplish the same tasks alone. When we design collaborative group tasks, we situate our learners within a learning community, “in which [they] construct their own competence” (Borthick. Jones, and Wakai, 2003, p. 111). Through this lens, course design should therefore be structured according to social interactions, and the transfer of knowledge and individual development that derives from them. When designing a course around collaborative group tasks, we need to attend to the interaction between our individual learner’s capabilities, and their peers, the course facilitator, and the tools or resources available to the tasks.

According to Borthwick, Jones, and Wakai (2003), this can be accomplished though a series of design stages:

Identify learning objectives
Arranging learning objectives in a JIT sequence
Configure tasks for learner performance
Develop strategies for facilitating learning activities
Designate contexts and source materials
Reconfigure learning activities

The first 5 phases of this process are intended to be completed in order, but in practice they may end of overlapping with one another. The final stage, on the other hand, should be completed after a course has been completed, in preparation for a future cohort.

1. Identify the learning objectives

The very first step that needs to be taken when designing a new course is taking a close look at its learning objectives. These should be identified, and verbalized in way that identifies the abilities that our students will have after the course has been completed. Such statements are exemplified well by the familiar can do statements that many language courses and coursebooks are designed around.

These objectives should of course emulate the nature of the tasks that will be required of our students once their studies have ended. Having stated these objectives, tasks can then be designed with the intent to trigger the need for further understanding. As students encounter gaps in their knowledge or ability, they will need to turn to their peers and other resources to gain enough understanding to complete the task.

This varies from traditional approaches to course design, where mastering concepts and digesting information precedes opportunities for application and performance based demonstration of learning objectives. Instead, course design here focuses on the performance of learning objectives, by intersecting collaborative practical tasks which are within the learners’ ZPDs with well reasoned performance targets.

2. Arrange learning objectives in a JIT sequence

Once the learning objectives have been clearly stated, they can be logically arranged to serve as a backbone for the course curriculum. Some learning objectives will require abilities which are prerequisite to others, and can be arranged accordingly. Similarly, within any learning objective, there may be several sub-objectives which can also be logically sequenced. Once these objectives and sub-objectives have been successfully organized, students can be guided through them, gradually developing their abilities as they progress through carefully designed group mediated interactions.

3. Configure tasks for learner performance

Once a sequence of learning objectives has been established, learning experiences which emulate the community of practice that our students wish to enter can be designed. Teachers can look to professionals in the field that their learners are preparing for as a source for these learning experiences. These experiences can be motivated both by looking at the day-to-day activities of in service professionals, as well as emerging tasks that these professionals are currently struggling with.

Under the premise of the ZPD, learners develop when they internalize the performance of skills by receiving assistance from an expert or more capable classmate. As mentioned earlier, students can benefit from each other due to varying skills and overlapping core competencies. In online and blended learning, however, our students need to have viable channels for collaboration in order to successfully transfer knowledge and expertise between them. Learning experiences should therefore be designed so that they include both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for interaction, as well as LMS (or similar) based solutions for collaboration.

4. Develop strategies for facilitating learning activities

Once collaborative group tasks have been designed for specifically identified and sequenced learning objectives, teachers can then begin considering the best strategies for facilitation during the course. This should be done with a light touch, helping where necessary, but only with the goal of supporting rather than directing learning.

This can take various forms:

Modeling that sets performance standards and makes invisible processes evident
Coaching to guide learners to expert performance
Scaffolding to support otherwise unattainable performance and fading to remove the support as proficiency increases
Questioning to elicit responses that reveal logic sequences learners cannot produce on their own
Encouraging learner exploration and application of problem-solving capabilities
Fostering learner reflection and self-awareness of performance
Providing cognitive task structuring through explaining and organizing tasks within learners’ ZPDs
Managing instruction with feedback so learners can proceed with confidence
Using direct instruction for ensuring clarity, supplying missing information, and showing latent knowledge structures (Borthick, Jones, & Wakai, 2003, p. 115)

5. Designate contexts and source materials

In addition to the selection of meaningful tasks, the context surrounding them is equally vital to their success. This contexts includes:

An appropriate level of detail
Justification for why the required skillset is desirable in the target community of practice
Demonstration of the consequences of performing at varying levels of proficiency
Authoritative literature or other sources pertaining to the performance of the task
Guidance for getting started with the task
Guidance for participating in synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in performing the task (Borthick, Jones, & Wakai, 2003, p. 116).

6. Reconfigure learning activities

As with any approach to course design, reflection following the completion of a semester is helpful to future cohorts. Course facilitators can look for evidence of mastery over the desired learning objectives, and re-calibrate learning activities for future cohorts.

References

Borthick, A. F., Jones, D. R., & Wakai, S. (2003). Designing Learning Experiences within Learners Zones of Proximal Development (ZPDs): Enabling Collaborative Learning On-Site and Online. Journal of Information Systems, 17(1), 107–134. doi: 10.2308/jis.2003.17.1.107

Pol, J. V. D., Volman, M., & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in Teacher–Student Interaction: A Decade of Research. Educational Psychology Review, 22(3), 271–296. doi: 10.1007/s10648-010-9127-6

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2 replies

Miriam says:
May 28, 2020 at 5:16 am

Great post, Jason, thank you for that. You show the complexity of course design and its issues. Very often collaboration is neglected or when planned, it is not scaffolded enough. In higher education faculty has often a very traditional image of the lonely student. Teachers think that learners can collaborate in the first place. But they don’t: Every group has to find its own way. Often there is no time for this part of the work to be done properly.
Reply
- Jason Parry says:
  June 9, 2020 at 10:33 am
  
  This was one of my major takeaways from ONL! Hopefully this can be focused on more in the future. Not only is collaboration not an innate skill in tertiary level students, but also it needs to be relearned with every new group dynamic. Unfortunately, since time is never abundant in curriculum planning, space for community building is often neglected in order to include more content. This of course is added to the detriment of quality.
  
  I hope to experiment with giving more attention to nurturing a sense of community and ‘learning to collaborate’ in the coming semester. Hopefully, this will have a positive impact on the quality of learning that follows.
  Reply

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