Balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches

Seb Schmoller reported on a presentation by Google's Peter Norvig at the ALT conference. According to Seb, the conclusion to Norvig's talk was that most education should be:

• centred on engaging, real-world projects;
• explored in teams;
• organised so that teachers are facilitators and can point to theoretical knowledge when it is needed ("which is less than you’d think").

While I agree that we place too much reliance on content that is specially prepared in advance of a a formal course of study, I'm aware that very many students would be sorely disappointed if we took this to an extreme and prepared nothing. I can think of several good reasons why trainers should make the effort to develop their own content:

• Your learners are relative novices and appreciate all the structure and support they can get.
• Sponsors of the training want to make sure that certain content is communicated consistently.
• The subject can be understood more easily with the help of quality aids such as graphics, 3D models, animations, videos, etc.
• Nothing suitable exists on the web or elsewhere.

Doubtless you can think of more reasons. Anyway, my real point is that we need to find the right balance between serving up knowledge on a plate and helping learners to construct their own. With this in mind, I spent some time reflecting on a course that I have just finished running, on the design of performance support materials. Here the issue arises in both the medium and the message.

First the medium. The course consists of a three week period of online study culminating in a two-day, face-to-face workshop. The course is hosted in Moodle, which in my view is ideal for supporting a collaborative distance learning model. During the online period, learners have the opportunity to consume some content that I prepared in advance. This includes:

• a welcome from me, recorded on my webcam;
• a concept map, providing an overview of the topics to be covered;
• a guide to the site, prepared using Captivate;
• a variety of materials that place performance support in context, created mainly with Articulate tools;
• an online version of my own Learning Object Design Assistant (LODA);
• a glossary of performance support terms that learners could add to;
• a wiki, primed with summaries of all the formal content plus suggested URLs and books;
• some relatively informal quizzes and surveys; and
• handouts, in PDF format for easy printing.

This may sound like a lot, but if a learner was to consume the lot, it would take a couple of hours, perhaps three.

That's the top-down element. The rest is strictly bottom-up. Online, learners collaborate using forums and two, one-hour synchronous sessions; they have their own blogs in Moodle (not used as much as I would have liked); they can, of course, also contribute to the glossary and the wiki. The workshop itself is content free. Each learner posts up what they want to get from the two days and what they are able to contribute in terms of their own expertise and experience. There's plenty of discussion, but the majority of the time is spent by learners in preparing prototypes of performance support materials and testing these out on other participants. I offer my own feedback and suggestions, but peer review provides the greatest value. After the course, learners have the opportunity to upload their prototypes on to the course website, for the benefit of future students. They also add their reviews of the tools they've been using to the wiki. In time, learner-generated content will form the major part of the site, providing a wealth of practical examples to inspire those that follow.

Could this course function as well without the content that I prepared in advance? Probably, but I don't believe as effectively. The content gave all learners a common starting point, elevating them from novices to eager participants. I may have been able to achieve the same with a text book (Gery? Rossett and Schafer?), but I wanted the materials to demonstrate performance support in action, something they achieved really well. Would the course have been improved by more formal content, including a more traditionally-structured classroom experience? Definitely no. Here's where I'm really with Peter Novig. I believe that learners are much more motivated by working on real work problems, ideally in the company of others with similar needs. Learning is a by-product of the experience, but no less important for that. It's also completely different for every learner.

Interestingly, in the case of this course, the issues apply as much to the message as to the medium. It would have been easy to confine a course on the subject of performance support to the top-down design and delivery of formal content. But of course, as all readers of this blog will be aware, the real fun is to be had from the bottom-up (and no innuendo intended). No organisation can hope to anticipate and satisfy all the requirements of their employees for information at the point of need. By providing a supportive culture and free access to thenecessary tools (search, forums, blogs, rss, social networking, etc.), employees can do a good job of fulfilling the rest of their requirements for themselves.