During the seventh semester of my undergrad, I took a course that changed the way I think of courses. It was dismal — so much so, that even to this day I cringe at the way it was administered. The topics and syllabus were literally the table of contents of the prescribed textbook. The instructor used the presentations made by the author and that were provided as supplementary material to the textbook; and to my abhorrence, the lectures consisted of pointing to, and parroting, the text on the slides. It seemed as if the entire course was designed around that textbook alone.
Higher education in India is rife with courses like this. They are simply an amalgamation of related topics without any encompassing learning objective. That feeling of having learned something concrete at the end of a course is missing.
Aside from flipped classrooms, lectures are usually the first encounter the students have with the material. Opening up a textbook after that initial exposure is a key moment in learning. It is a lot like taking off the training wheels and balancing on your own for the first time. An ideal course sets the student up for an investigative thought process, as opposed to merely spewing out information. The entire course must very subtly push the student to ask the right questions — questions that will eventually force the student to zoom out from the individual topics and to think about the big picture.
Consider an introductory course on integral calculus. Usually a course like this strives to get the student familiar with solving different types of integrals. But will that process do justice to the underlying beauty of the integral as a mathematical technique, its nuances and interrelationships? In my view, the course must put the student on an epistemological journey, at the end of which no mathematical definition will suffice to answer the question: What is an integral? This forces the true understanding of an idea, an understanding that transcends any form of written expression. It’s one thing to get the student familiar with solving math problems, but it’s another, to forever change the way he thinks of an integral.
Constructivism is a philosophy of education that views the process of learning as the incorporation of new knowledge into the learner’s existing worldview. Instead of viewing the mind as a computer’s hard drive — deleting and adding new ideas — it views it as the complex organism that it is: learning, adapting, incorporating. Better learning is brought about by more inquiry; questions help reassess preconceptions, making assimilation of new ideas more concrete.
This is why supplementary material plays an important role. It must trigger questions that make the student go back and think about his first encounter with the idea — the lecture. The lecture itself must be comprehensive enough to form a baseline knowledge, and yet have deliberate exclusions that push the student into inquiry. All this, without running the risk of inducing misinformed notions and ambiguity.
Course design isn’t merely selecting a few topics and then a textbook that contains them. It involves understanding the vast interplay between the lecturer and his instruction style, the students and their learning demographics, the material and resources available — all in order to create a perfect cohesion and harmony between these elements.
This begs the question, were the course designers for that undergrad course themselves asking the right questions? What are the key learning objectives of the course? What topics would best help the student gain the skills required to meet the objectives? What method of instruction would best illustrate these topics? What is the learning demographic of the class?
What is fundamentally overlooked in course design is the fact that in addition to exploring tangible objectives and parameters, a course designer must address the underlying, yet tacitly understood structures and abstractions inherent in a subject or field of study. Designing an arithmetic course must seek to make the student think like a mathematician, with a keen eye for interrelationships and patterns, in addition to developing the skills to solve problems. In most cases, effective problem solving is usually a by-product of that keen eye.
When you watch a cooking show, you write down the instructions precisely, and expose yourself to the more experienced instructors’ methods. But any good cook knows that cooking isn’t just about following a recipe, it is about understanding the vast interplay between the ingredients — their flavors, structure and texture. The underlying beauty of something can never be taught, it must be found.
Inquiry is the intellectual equivalent of playing with the ingredients. Thus, be it course design or taking a course itself, questions are usually the best place to start.
[Photo “Distorted” by Iagooli, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]
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