Five Common Challenges to Working with Educational Content
Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash
The most challenging moments I’ve experienced working with the Eight Steps of Design in Dialogue Education have come when it’s time to name all the skills, concepts, and perspectives — the content — that will go into a learning event. Content can be surprisingly slippery to work with.
It’s easy to believe that content is the most straightforward aspect of a learning-centered design — but it isn’t! Researching, curating, summarizing, “chunking,” and sequencing content is hard work with many false starts, dead ends, and high hills to climb.
Being aware of all these pitfalls can help a designer overcome them or avoid them to begin with. Here are five common challenges I’ve experienced when working with course content.
1. Having Too Much “What” for the “When”
There’s a good reason “don’t have too much ‘what’ for the ‘when’” has become a popular axiom in Dialogue Education. Knowledge is interconnected, sprawling, and ever-growing. As designers, we will always be tempted to cram one more skill, one more concept, one more perspective into a learning event that is already over-stuffed with relevant content. The more content we put in, the less room we have for the dialogue and the “doing” that constitute real learning. Every other step in the Eight Steps of Design can help you choose essential content and leave everything else for another learning event.
2. Working with Content that Hasn’t Been Chunked
Much of the content we work with as designers comes to us in bigger formats that need to be broken down — or “chunked” — before we can weave them into the learning tasks that make up our designs. Most of our clients and collaborators won’t be in the habit of thinking about content separate from the specific media that carries it. You’ll hear clients say they want a course to “cover” a particular book or article, or they’ll email you a link to a video or a podcast and say, “this is important — we need to include it in the workshop.” But no single learning task can grapple with the entirety of a book or article. Even a brief video can contain a pile of different skills, concepts, and perspectives. Chunking content takes time, energy, and some skill in synthesizing big ideas into manageable bits of knowledge that learners can work with one thoughtful step at a time.
3. Receiving Content that Hasn’t Been Sorted, Sequenced, or Curated
I participated in the design of a multi-week learning event for a client that wanted a massive trove of books, articles, websites, videos, and podcasts to be “covered” across the sessions. Not only did we need to chunk all the content to make it available for designing learning tasks, but we also needed to sort and appropriately sequence the thousands of individual skills, concepts, and perspectives we found across all those materials. We worked to identify which pieces of content were accessible to learners with little prior knowledge of the topic and which bits were more nuanced and challenging and needed to come later in the learning experience. And, of course, at the end of all that sorting and sequencing, we found ourselves with far more content than we could ever include in the design — not to mention piles of skills, concepts, and perspectives that contradicted or simply didn’t fit with other bits of content found in the same trove of materials. In that moment, we ceased to be learning designers and transformed into subject matter experts, making authoritative choices about what to include and what to set aside to complete the project.
4. Receiving Content in a PowerPoint Deck
A PowerPoint deck is a great medium for pitching an argument, but it’s a lousy repository for storing complex or nuanced knowledge. The best slide decks are short on text and big on graphics or images that augment the words coming out of a presenter’s mouth in real time. Decks, by design, carry very little useful information. So, whenever I receive content from a client in the form of a PowerPoint deck, I know I’ll be spending a lot of time researching the actual skills, concepts, and perspectives that will go into my course design. The decks rarely have all the detail I need to get the job done.
5. Making Tacit Knowledge Explicit and Accessible
Much of the knowledge you carry around with you is difficult to put into words. As the philosopher Michael Polanyi said, “We know more than we can tell.” Some of the most important skills you’ve ever developed didn’t involve an instruction manual or a step-by-step (think of riding a bike or cooking a family recipe). The wisdom you carry in your gut gets encoded in feelings and emotions more than sentences and paragraphs. Some of the knowledge we work with as designers simply hasn’t been explicated, or put into words, by subject matter experts. Our task in these cases involves getting them to share plainly and cogently what they know so we can put it down on paper and work it into our designs. But in many other cases, useful knowledge resists being put directly into words, and we need to satisfy ourselves with making up metaphors and stories that carry the gist of what we mean to make it accessible to learners.