Teaching a hundred thousand students - one student at a time.
As we look across the landscape of online teaching, we have seen many of the early problems that the rush to online education brought with it.
In an earlier article we talked about some of the root causes for these problems and raised the possibility of a new model for online education with the potential to address the shortcomings of this technology.
Fundamentally, we describe a more asynchronous teaching module, that works with smaller groups of individual learners who have periods of work online and come together for teacher led, interactive sessions at regular intervals. We call this the “tutorial” model of education after the Oxbridge tutorial system.
One of the more interesting aspects of implementing this kind of teaching model at scale is answering the question - how do we provide individual learning pathways through a curriculum for each one of a hundred thousand students?
In addition to direct instructional material, we may have numerous additional multi-media resources and links to other available content that forms part of our resource library. What abstractions do we need to implement and what tools do we need to have in place so that creating these paths is simple for educators.
The first step is to realize that when we talk about providing individual learning pathways through a curriculum for thousands of students we are not talking about thousands of individual pieces of content. Much educational content is structured and organized in many ways. For example by subject, lesson, age, language or curriculum. This is a natural structuring that we can take advantage of to limit the complexity of our problem. If we permit our elements of learning to be classified according to this natural taxonomy of learning and then permit multiple labels to describe the content at each level we find ourselves with a compact and understandable classification scheme that will allow us to easily identify any individual learning element.
Most of us are familiar with the Dewey Decimal System of classification - its usually among the first few lessons you are taught as you learn to use a library. The Dewey Decimal Classification is a hierarchical classification scheme, and works by assigning a three digit number to a broad field of study, with the individual numbers indicating further and further specialization (using more numbers after the decimal point if necessary). For example, the first three levels of hierarchy for mathematics and science are:
500 Natural sciences and mathematics
510 Mathematics
516 Geometry
However this kind of hierarchical organization is missing the second part of what we want, ie the ability to identify multiple instances of information within a hierarchical level by labelling or somehow otherwise tagging them.
It turns out that what we are talking about is a faceted classification system. Wikipedia has a pithy two sentence description “A faceted classification system uses a set of semantically cohesive categories that are combined as needed to create an expression of a concept. In this way, the faceted classification is not limited to already defined concepts.” It also goes on to point out that “While this makes the classification quite flexible, it also makes the resulting expression of topics complex.”
But hey, that’s what computers are for.
Wikipedia further hints that “To the extent possible, facets represent "clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects of a subject. The premise is that any subject or class can be analyzed into its component parts (i.e., its aspects, properties, or characteristics).Some commonly used general-purpose facets are time, place, and form.”
This is beginning to sound like what we want to do.
From working with several organizations that have large collections of content, we have developed an extensible faceted classification scheme for content. This combines a set of broadly hierarchical categories together with an easily expandable set of aspects that can be assigned to elements in the resource collection. This makes it possible to very easily select the necessary learning content for a learner and to put together a collection of learning elements to create a individualized learning path. We call these collections bundles, and they provide the final brick in our content organization strategy.
Here is a screenshot of a content organization.
Each card represents an element or bundle of learning content.
Primary hierarchy elements include Curriculum, Grade, Subject and Publisher. Listed on the card are the values of aspects.
A simple click on an aspect displays all content with that aspect, or if desired a simple drop down search allows multiple aspects to be chosen to identify material very specifically. the bundle card shows the number of elements (in this case lessons) contained within the bundle.
Any bundle can be book-marked, shared or opened in the browser for review or use. Bundles can be created and stored for future use.
Welcome to your individualized learning journey !
