Designing for Learning: The Pursuit of Well-Structured Content
- By Judith V. Boettcher
- 12/30/02
How do you make course content really accessible to your students? Just as
being an expert in your discipline is not by itself a guarantee of good pedagogy,
your best-laid technology plans might miss the mark if they are not fine-tuned
to the content you wish to present. And the best technology strategies benefit
from semantically clear, structured content. Here, Judith B'ettcher takes a
look at the characteristics of "well-structured content" as it relates to the
design of instructional technology resources.
With the emergence of the Web as a new space for instruction, the focus of
most analyses of teaching and learning has been on process—overhauling what
faculty and students are doing within the learning experience. The organization
of what is being taught and its availability in various formats—the structure
of the course content—has received much less attention.
Meanwhile, content development has certainly not been neglected. Digital libraries,
national content projects such as MERLOT (www.merlot.org),
and the work by the W3C on Web accessibility (www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/)
are all efforts that foster the evolution of standards and tools for interoperability
and easy access to content resources. There is clearly a trend toward further
development of knowledge repositories within the disciplines.
But I think it is time now for a renewed emphasis on content resources for
learning, along with increased efforts to make course content efficient and
effective for students—in other words, well-structured content.
The Meaning of Well-Structured Content
The dictionary definition of the word "structure" is useful. The basic definition
of structure is "the result of the action of building or constructing." This
definition links well to the currently favored learning theory of constructivism.
A more elaborate definition of structure is "something arranged in a definite
pattern of organization." This definition suggests one of the desirable characteristics
of well-structured learning content. That is, content for which an organization
is clearly visible and in which concepts are presented clearly and precisely.
Course content—the material to be learned or studied—is one of the
four core components of the learning experience. The other three are the teaching,
the learner, and the environmental components.
Consider the relationship of well-structured content to the design of an online
course. Online learning based on well-structured content impacts the identification,
selection, and development of course content in three ways:
- Content must be semantically well-structured for instruction; this corresponds
to the teaching component of the learning experience
- Content must be a good fit or well-structured for a particular student;
this corresponds to the learner component of the learning experience
- Content must be technologically well structured; this corresponds to the
environmental component of the learning experience
Note that the meaning of well-structured content g'es well beyond the dictionary
definitions of structure. It includes the nuances of interaction with the other
three components of the learning experience—teaching, learner, and environmental.