How many times as a teacher or designer have you heard the complaint that the separate parts of a course ‘don’t seem to belong to each other’? You have probably had to respond to the complaint of non-integration in a…
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In this case study we return to the Botany students and their encounter with the use of the scientific method of enquiry into the phenomenon of apical dominance in plants. The results, you will remember, were not all that we…
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‘Chain’, ‘necklace’, ‘spiral’, ‘network’, ‘hybrid’ — these are the titles we use in the Think Tank workshop for the different methods of sequencing S-R events that a thought-up design can demand. A thought-up design has a ‘route map’ in it;…
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As a designer of courses and lessons you will always be in demand if you have success in creating response environments for learning in which students are given the responsibility and the chance to think for themselves.
Thinking up a design takes time: before the optimum design is found a lot of mental effort will be demanded. It can be nice to have something to accelerate the process. This is what referent 3: an appropriate model is…
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On repeated occasions in 1964 on the shuttle flight between La Guardia airport New York and National airport Washington DC, I was struggling with a course design problem. It seemed relatively simple and yet the solution (the choice of a…
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The activities involved in designing a course or lesson are illustrated in Fig. 1. By name, they will be quite familiar to those of you who know and have used the so-called ‘systems approach’ at the micro level. Activity 4…
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