A number of online programs now have a “plain language” requirement for course content. This means that course content cannot use words that might be unknown to some students; institutions enforce the policy by keeping the content language at or below a designated education
Online courses are normally designed from an institutional template of common elements without reference to any particular subject matter. But this lack of context can get repetitive and boring. Faculty can instead design their courses with a theme that unifies the elements and pulls
There are three types of assessments. A diagnostic assessment comes before learning, is ungraded, and measures prior knowledge of the upcoming learning material. It can be used to determine what needs to be taught. A summative assessment comes at the end of learning, is
Over the past half century, colleges and universities have prioritized students’ global awareness and intercultural communication skills as institutional outcomes. The goal is that graduates will be prepared to contribute to diverse workplaces and be able to communicate with people from different cultures. Historically, these
The term design thinking has cropped up in education journals and conference brochures more and more over the past few years, but its meaning remains a mystery to most instructors. The term comes from the business sector, where it refers to a process of learning
The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and
Case-based learning (CBL) is a teaching method that uses real-life scenarios to teach skill-based tasks. At the same time, it enhances learners’ awareness of the various contextual factors that affect problem-solving in complicated cases.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL), developed by CAST, is an international framework for educators to design content for all learners. The UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessment, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.
Students claim to be overwhelmed with additional work during the 2020–2021 teaching year, while faculty say that they are assigning no more work than usual (McMurtrie, 2021). Squaring these contradictory self-reports provides important insights into issues with determining workload for an online class.
As spring 2021 approaches, emergency remote teaching has perpetuated the need to offer online courses, without time to properly design and prepare for its implementation. While some faculty members were already teaching online or hybrid courses before the pandemic, for many others, their introduction to
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A number of online programs now have a “plain language” requirement for course content. This means that course content cannot use words that might be unknown to some students; institutions enforce the policy by keeping the content language at or below a designated education level. That level can be anywhere from sixth to 10th grade. Course developers are given these parameters, and often a separate group goes through the course content to replace big words with small ones and replace outside resources that are above the proscribed level. Here are some examples from actual institutional guidelines:
Regulations like these don’t come from a learning perspective. Indeed, they prevent learning. The fact that a student does not know something is not a reason to withhold that knowledge from the student but a reason to teach it to them. We don’t learn by encountering what we already know; we learn by encountering what we don’t already know. Instead of withholding learning from students, we should foster it.
Plain language directives in online learning have multiple sources. One is the desire to include people with limited exposure to complex vocabulary. This rationale, however, overlooks the importance of preparing students for word-rich environments, like jobs requiring a college degree. Students who are not familiar with college-level words are precisely those that need exposure to them to develop their vocabularies. Keeping them at a K–12 level only harms their future prospects by withholding the education that they have paid for.
A second source involves confusion between assessments and learning content. It is good practice to avoid negatives within sentences on assessments because they can induce confusion about the question itself, leading students who know the answer to respond incorrectly. As assessments are for measuring content knowledge, such errors undermine the accuracy of the assessment. But this rationale does not apply to learning content, where the purpose is to produce learning, not measure prior learning. What began with assessments has been uncritically applied to the separate category of learning content.
A third source is the conflation of marketing and teaching. I find that online content formatting rules often come from the marketing department, such as the requirement that all course presentations use the slide template that marketing provides. Similarly, the plain language rules often come from marketing departments that apply the fundamental marketing principle that advertising language should be as simple as possible to avoid losing potential customers. Teaching, of course, is not marketing—it has a fundamentally different purpose—yet this marketing rule has migrated into course design requirements.
The desire to “meet students where they are” is perfectly legitimate as long as we understand that learning involves moving from where we are to someplace new by encountering something new. When I went to college many years ago, students were advised to keep a dictionary with them to learn any new words. Today, we can make it easier on students by linking higher-level words in online courses to their definitions so that anyone who does not know the word can quickly learn it. The words then become learning moments. By eliminating these words from courses, we are only depriving the students who need to expand their vocabularies of the education they are owed.
