It may all be just semantics, but there are some people
in education technology and on campus who think the term “course” should be replaced
by “learning experience” as the way to describe online education. They see the
traditional 90-minute lecture as an ineffective way to deliver content online
and note that instructors are being encouraged to break up content into
single-concept modules.
Breaking content into modules makes it easier to share
and has little resemblance to what students understand as a “course.” In
addition, the term “learning experience” suggests a difference in the way
students get the information, according to a report in Inside Higher Education.
“The learning experience has to do with things that
occur by design and all sorts of other things that aren’t on the syllabus that
are spontaneous and student-generated,” said Matthew H. Cooper, CEO of Acatar,
a flipped-classroom platform developed by Carnegie-Mellon University.
“We, too, see the boundaries of the traditional course
eroding away,” added Ryan Gialames, senior director of product strategy and
user experience at Acatar. “We’re speaking with folks at CMU who are interested
in building this whole body of knowledge, then figuring individual paths to
point students through it. It’s also just as important when you’ve got that
body of knowledge that you can build maps and paths.”
Of course, not everyone is sold on the new terminology.
For instance, Blackboard has found that more attention is being paid to
learning outside traditional courses, but isn’t ready to drop the term.
“There’s, of course, good reason to be skeptical and
critical, but this is not a term that is baseless or just cute-sounding,” Robert
A. Lue, faculty director at Harvard University, said of the term “learning
experience.” “There’s corporate speak, there’s academic speak, there’s all
sorts of education speak, and this certainly falls into that. You know what,
though? These terms and how they are selected carry meaning.”
