If a designer is to come up with an optimum solution to the problem of thinking up a design, the existence of a set of criteria against which to test an idea that is being considered can be very helpful. When drawn into the think tank, such criteria become referent 1: a set of criteria for a good design.
Those which I would use as such are the eight criteria listed in Table 3. Other writers on the subject of course and lesson design might well choose others, or add to the eight I have given. The selections I have made are based on their value to me in many different design decision-making operations. As a referent, it is very important that these criteria work for you and not you for them. When you work for them they are no more than a static list of criteria against which to check off the quality of the decisions you are making. When they work for you, they not only provide principles against which to check your decisions; they also, as a referent, are there explicitly to stimulate your thinking and give you new ideas for a design.
Criterion 1, regarding active as opposed to passive learning, emphasizes the importance of involving the learner — mentally and/or physically — in the learning process. An earlier quotation from Tyler (1949) drew attention to the importance of learner activity and participation: ‘A student learns from what he does and not from what the teacher does.’
Criterion 2 emphasizes how critical it is that a design utilizes didactically meaningful responses. Responses are the things which the design gets the learner to do via the stimuli (pictures, statements, materials, problems to solve, etc) which are brought into the learning environment. For a response to be ‘meaningful’ in the sense intended in this book, it must pass a certain test (Earl, 1973): (a) the response must be relevant for the learning goal, (b) the response must be necessary for reaching the learning goal, (c) the response must be possible for the learner to make, and (d) the response must be effective. An ‘effective’ response in this context is one which results in some increment (large or small) in learning, or some strengthening of learning that has already taken place. The response in question must be meaningful, whether it is a mental response in the privacy of the learner’s mind or an open response; and whether it is specifically invited or is a spontaneous (ie not specifically invited) response generated by the design. Many courses and lessons fail because their designs generate non-meaningful responses.
Criterion 3 alerts the designer to the fact that the ‘plan, structure and strategy’ of instruction chosen will assign control over the learning process to the learner, or to the instructor, or let them share it (see Fig. 4). To what degree the teacher and/or the student should have control at a given moment in a course or lesson is always a tricky question. Whichever way things go, ‘control’ or ‘freedom’ must never be aversive. Criterion 3 makes sure one doesn’t avoid the tricky question. The best designs will always vary the degree of control given to or shared by teacher and learner — to left or right, for example, of the centre of the scale (Tennyson and Breuer, 1984) given in Fig. 4. Criterion 3 is very influential in the choice of a design.
Criterion 4 requires the designer to ‘respect but outwit constraints’. The word ‘constraints’ refers to the givens in the system — things which have been specified as such in the ‘needs specification’, and which in principle cannot be changed. What the designer must do is use his craft and ingenuity in outwitting them. Constraints in the system include development schedules, money available for production, materials available, expert help available, and learning time. Satisfying criterion 4 calls for didactical cunning. You need to be a didactical fox.
Criterion 5 requires the design to provide ‘feedback’ to the learner. Feedback is information on how you are progressing. It could be the correct solution to a problem which the learner has been asked to solve, the correct version of something she or he has been asked to draw or the correct composition of a cough mixture that she or he has been asked to make up.
It’s always nice to have knowledge of the results of your efforts in a learning situation — especially when you are getting correct results! Feedback is as important to university graduates in advanced degree programmes as it is to small children in kindergarten. Positive results and the knowledge that we as learners have of them, are highly motivating.
Criterion 6, about the ‘critical use of media’ is telling you (as a designer) that the design you think up and use must not make unnecessary or inappropriate use of media. ‘Media’ here mean the hardware and audio-visual aids that can be given a role in a course or lesson. If you have ever sat in a lecture in which the lecturer projected slide after slide of information when two would have been more than enough, you will know what criterion 6 is all about. The critical use of media is easy to check. If the, learning result would be the same without the use of the media (whatever it may be — computer, video player, set of slides), then its use is `non-critical’.
Criterion 7, about ease of extension, points a finger at a simple truth: a design can never satisfy every learner’s personal needs. It tells you that it will always be an advantage to think up a design that can easily accommodate adjunct instruction for learners (fast or slow) if such proves to be necessary.
Criterion 8, about a design having to be based on a systematic specification of the learning needs, honours the discipline of the ‘systems approach’ in course and lesson design decision-making. At the same time it implicitly reaffirms the fundamental premise that ‘thinking up, working out and testing-and-revising a design for a course or lesson’ is something in its own right. It occurs after the needs have been specified. If the design you have thought up is not based on a specification of the needs, then the chances are that the course or lesson you are making will be based on your needs as a learner and not on the needs of the real learner population. You could well find that you are making the course or lesson for yourself!
Here is a way to enable you to ‘feel’ how the eight criteria for a good design can function as referent 1 in a designer’s think tank. Think about a subject that you like, know well and could teach. It doesn’t matter what it is — reading a finger print, making jam, setting up a distillation apparatus, laying a table, fishing, or the Battle of Hastings. Think about what the subject is going to cover. Think about how you would teach it.
Think about your plan, structure and strategy of instruction. Now let your mind rove back and forth, over and amongst the eight criteria for a good design. Turn back to Table 3 if you need to. Try to ‘feel’ the influence of these eight criteria on your idea for a design.
What are the criteria saying to your intuition? To your creativity? Do they make you think more logically and carefully?
Are they changing your first idea for a plan, structure and strategy of instruction? Are they telling you to throw this first idea out? to keep it at all costs? If they do all or some of these things, then these criteria for a good design are working for you, not you for them. That’s how it should be. The criteria are working for you, in your think tank, as,our referent 1.