This post is about one persistent element of instructional design of courses in all LMSs I know that has kept me baffled for years, and that – despite my efforts, and students’ apparent preference* simply refuses to take hold… I’m talking about the chronological order (layout) of Modules or Weeks pages in most LMS systems I have used and know (which is a substantial number by now).
There are several contexts, related to technology, where reverse-chronological order is taken it for granted, without much thought or reflection. By reverse-chronological I mean the newest content on top, and oldest at the bottom of the scrolling page. We could take as our example any blog or podcast: most people would consider it insane (or at least annoyingly inconvenient) if they had to scroll all the way down the page past – say 100+ posts or podcast episodes – to get to the most recent one. We don’t even think about it: the most recent blog post or podcast is.. on top! Duh!
But it is not actually natural – podcasts and blog-posts aren’t apples that grow on trees – the interface of blogs and podcasts has been deliberately designed to be this way, and it is a prefect example of smart choice architecture that operates so discreetly, that it practically disappears, becoming transparent and invisible to the point of seeming natural.
On the other hand, think about online course content that millions of students access every day in various learning management systems (LMSs), like BlackBoard, or Canvas, or many others… In all such systems, new content, invariably gets placed at the bottom of the page. So whenever you access your course either as a student or as an instructor – what you see on top of the Modules or Weeks page, is Module 1 / Week 1, even if you are now in week 12 of the semester. In practice, this means that every time you access the course, you have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, (I know, ANNOYING, ain’t it?) to get to the content that is relevant NOW, THIS WEEK. Some LMSs, such as Canvas we use, even insist on automatically adding any new element of the course at the bottom of the Modules page…. Click “Add module” and the new module lands 5 screens below the lower edge of your monitor, out of sight, below everything else that was there, and you’ll now have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll to see it… Duh.
The big and mysteriously unanswered question is WHY? Doesn’t everyone get tired of this? Isn’t it cumbersome? Couldn’t it be easily fixed by companies that make LMSs? Well, not so fast.
Atul Gawande, a very popular physician, innovator, and prolific writer wrote a seminal 2013 article, published in the New Yorker. Titled Slow ideas; the article considered why some innovations spread quickly, almost instantaneously, while others, often no less useful, lingered for years or decades, and sometimes never took hold despite of the undeniable benefits they would offer. As Gawande pointed out, the key point is who benefits, and then the whole process pivots on whether the person who benefits is the decider with the power to impact and change the process. Gawande gives a perfect example of early disinfectants invented for use during surgery that potentially could have saved lives, but were very cumbersome for physicians to use, and consequently were slow to get adopted.
In 2011 when Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the then-new operating system, one of the small but impossible to ignore innovations was the change in the direction of scrolling. Some people, especially older people who still remembered computers without graphic interface, felt baffled and confused. They were accustomed to the content moving the other way, and the new way seemed… well… UNNATURAL. But the new scrolling order was not designed for the past: it was designed for the fast-arriving future in which most of us would be dealing with touch screens where drag-down (tap-and-hold, then move down) moves content down until you get to the top of the page, while flicking content on the screen up moves lest you scroll down the page. Because touch-screen interfaces are now so omnipresent in our lives, having your computer track-pad behave differently feels odd now (to me)!. However, to accommodate the transitional period and those who find this innovation unnatural, there was originally an operating system settings option that let you turn this “innovation” off. Apparently, quite a few people still do.
Students’ freedom of choice, when it comes to course design, is severely limited by numerous factors. First, few students give enough thought to course design to realize that a very simple change in the order of presented material could save them a lot of time and frustration. Students rarely get to see the courses in the LMS before the start of the semester, and even if they did, 99% of the courses follow the same pattern. Moreover, even if some courses were using a dramatically and clearly better design, student often have limited choice in selecting courses: most courses are taken because students need those speciific courses at this specific time in their program; only a few electives are truly “open” choices that are competing for enrollments. Instructors could help, but like surgeons who resisted disinfectants in Gawande’s article, they too would be inconvenienced, as there is presently no easy, automated way to do this, other than rearranging modules in reverse-chronological order manually.
This doesn’t deter us! In the past I had one faculty my team wrks with consent to let us do the “flip” in their course (we made it easy – for the faculty, it just “happened”); this semester I found another brave souls not afraid to innovate. I hope she gets generously rewarded on her teaching evaluations. And this summer we are going to offer the “chronological flip” as an option to all summer faculty – we have fewer courses in summer term where I work, so this is a perfect timing for a pilot – we can see how many people are interested, and we will measure (with an actual timer!) how quickly we can flip a 8-15 week / module course, starting in week/module 3 or 4. I’m looking forward to this experiment, and will report here (below this post) at the end of the summer 2023 how it went, and if we’re going to expand it to more courses!
MusingsOnTandL.com 