4.3.5 The non-integration problem

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 course or lesson more than once. It’s a common problem.

4.4 Case study no. 5: Riding out the storm

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 hoped for in this think-band-do-for-yourself type of experiment. The encounter in most groups scored too […]

3.3 What choice is there for sequencing the S-R events?

‘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; it will tell you the order in which it wants the worked-out design to let […]

2.7 Case study no. 2: Fighting forest fires safely

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 plan, structure and strategy of instruction for the course involved) eluded me time and time […]

1.4 Where does the ‘design process’ begin and end?

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 in the activity cycle (Fig. 1) is the one which interests us most in this […]