Stackmaps

This week, I realized we need to test new curriculum far more frequently than I had previously assumed. To be fair, we abandoned the "textbook model of curriculum development" (in which a team of brilliant people lock themselves in a room for many months, edit their brilliance into a series of lesson plans, and emerge with a complete course) ten years ago when we taught our first full stack web development intensive. Over the last five years, we fell into a cadence in which we created one week of curriculum at a time, collecting feedback from learners and making revisions promptly. This cadence worked well in the so-called "blended learning" setting in which we could interact with students in person in addition to online.

The historical moment known as "shelter in place" gave us an a-ha moment: iterating curriculum at a much finer time scale has the potential to keep more learners engaged. In a fully remote learning situation, the stakes feel higher than they do in blended and in-person learning. If a learner does not enjoy the first hour of a remote course, we may lose that person. They may put the material aside for many weeks and dread the day they have to repeat the first hour of curriculum, having forgotten what they learned. Worse yet, they may drop out of the course altogether. A disengaged learner rarely serves as a strong advocate for their peers.

What does it look like to engage the learner from Hour 1? What new challenges arise in remote learning as we consider how best to collect learner feedback?

Blended learning provided us with a multitude of informal feedback opportunities. We could look over a particular learner's shoulder during solo work time, overhear conversations between student team members working on a design project, and speak with learners briefly after class. All of these pieces of small feedback add up. Collecting feedback via these avenues enables us, as educators, to form a complete picture of how learners react to particular learning material.

Today's remote learning environment lacks the informal opportunities provided by blended learning. We have no means of speaking informally with learners because every interaction must be scheduled and planned (and accompanied by a video conference link). We have no guarantee that a particular learner will return to class tomorrow because none of the same social pressures exist to encourage them to do so. A new order must be built to support informal peer-to-peer interactions as well, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post.

I suspect learners will demand a higher level of interactivity in fully remote courses. Reading feedback forms submitted by curriculum reviewers this week reminds me that the first hour matters much more than I might like to admit.

I can no longer assume that a dynamic, energetic lecturer's charisma makes up for any perceived mundanities in the course material.

In remote learning, the learner has the power to literally and figuratively "minimize" all lecturers, dynamic or not, by shrinking the window, opening a new browser tab, or muting the video feed in order to take a phone call.

We live in a new era.

We face the challenge of using surprise or creativity or new interactivity or all of the above to catch learner attention -- and keep it.

It's a challenge I'm looking forward to.