Everyone who teaches has had this experience: you write clear learning outcomes and design fantastic activities to help students get there, but despite all your planning, students aren’t able to achieve the learning outcomes. This is a frustrating experience, but it can be avoided to a certain degree by anticipating where and why students are going to have difficulty and designing for those difficulties.
This involves identifying learning gaps- the gaps between where students are when they begin your class, and where you want them to be when they finish. Once you’ve done this, you can design activities to target or at least take into account those gaps.
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In “Design for How People Learn”, Julie Dirksen describes six types of potential learning gaps and suggests ways that activities and learning plans can be tailored to bridge them.’
Knowledge gap
The first kind of gap is a knowledge gap: students don’t have the right information, or enough information, to achieve the learning outcome. Most of the time, fixing this gap involves giving students the information they need at strategic points- like pointing them to a library resource module before asking them to do a research activity. If all the student needs is information, this kind of gap is easy to fix with content.
Skill gaps
Most of the time though, students don’t know what to do with the information they’ve been given. These kinds of gaps are skill gaps- students need to be guided and coached through what to do with the information or content you give them, and students can’t become proficient at these skills without practice. To determine if your outcomes might present skill gaps, ask yourself if the outcome is something that requires practice or not. If it does, the chances are good that skill gaps will exist, and your activities should be tailored to allow for practice and coaching. This approach is sometimes referred to as cognitive apprenticeship- which we will address in a later presentation.
Motivational gap
When you’re thinking about your students and learning gaps, motivation is key.If a student has the right information and has been coached through using it but doesn’t, it’s a motivation gap. Students may not be motivated because they don’t buy the learning outcomes, or the learning outcomes aren’t clearly stated. Often, students aren’t motivated because they don’t get the big picture- most often because they aren’t presented with the big picture. Giving your students some context for their learning will go a long way to help fill this gap- this translates to pedagogic transparency (why are we doing this?) and curricular and co-curricular clarity (how does it pertain to my life or my education?)
Of course, if students just don’t care, the motivation gap is more difficult to bridge. If students are content to get a C in your course, are they going to go the extra mile to really understand a certain concept? What would motivate a student to fill this gap?
In learning theory, Motivation is often stated in terms of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is something that comes from within a student- they are internally motivated to bridge the gap between their current state and the learning outcome. These intrinsically motivated students are easy to coach and are usually quite pro-active because they see how what they’re learning in your course helps them directly. Extrinsically motivated students are motivated by external rewards like grades or a job. These students are more difficult to teach because activities need to be presented and designed in a way that they can relate value to their goals and lives.
When you think about activity design, the challenge is to think about how can you re-design your activities to draw out your learners’ intrinsic motivation. Sometimes it might not be possible, but if you have a lot of experience that tells you that a certain activity just isn’t connecting with your students, it’s worth it to try.
Change gap
Another type of learning gap is the change gap. Most of us encounter this type of gap when we design an activity that requires students to think or learn in a way that they aren’t used to- this involves undoing old learning habits and practices. For example, if you are pretty sure that students have learned to use library research databases in less than effective ways, you may want to include a module that coaches them through changing those habits, rather than assuming that they can or will change those habits.
Environmental gap
Sometimes, the practical elements of actually doing the activities aren’t supported or rewarded by the organization or environment. This is a environmental gap. For example, there might not be enough statistical computing software licenses available for students in a research methods course. It’s important to anticipate these environmental gaps and alter your activities accordingly.
Communication gap
In my experience designing online courses, the most common type of learning gap is actually a communication gap: students are given unclear or insufficient directions, confusing objectives, or aren’t given enough context for the activities or content they are being presented with. These gaps in communication are really easy to overlook in online courses in particular, because we’re used to doing so much of the communication of expectations and activities in the classroom. It is important to budget enough time to write or record thorough instructions and explanations for all of your activities and content. Later in this sequence, presentation #12 addresses writing effective instructions and a learning narrative that gives your students the context they need to succeed.
As you design your course, it may be helpful to think about where your students might encounter learning gaps, and adjust your activities and feedback strategies to compensate for them.
If you are interested in learning more about learning gaps and general course design, check out “Design for How People Learn” by Julie Dirksen.
OAI Course Design Workbook 