“What model are we using for our online course development?” asked one of my team.
“I’m not sure what model we’re using, only that it’s evolving. For now,” I responded, “we aren’t offering self-paced courses that are 100% independent and online. All of our courses are instructor-led, but online.”

This was only part of the conversation I had with some of my team. It’s been months since I first announced that we were embarking on a journey, trying to find a standard format or template to design courses around. As I chatted with two of my team, I had this blog entry in mind, “Are Your E-Learning Courses Pushed or Pulled?” This point is made in that entry:

The default position for many elearning courses is to merely push the information out to the learners. The end result is that the course is heavy on information and light on interaction. By changing the way you structure the information, you can quickly build the framework for more engaging and interactive courses. It’s just a matter of rethinking how you approach the course design…The downside to pushing your content to the learners is that it assumes that all of the information is equally relevant to the learners and meets their learning needs.

Of course, this is exactly the approach in use in the course under development in my situation. The author of the E-Learning article proposes a different approach that looks like this:

…in this [Pull] approach, you’re not focusing on designing the content as much as you are creating reasons to use the content. What you want to do is get the learner to pull the content he needs. This allows each learner to have access to the same information, yet the learning experience might be unique to the learner. So instead of focusing on creating a universal design that pushes the content, you focus on crafting the right types of reasons a person needs to pull the content. With this approach you can still provide all of the same information. All you’re doing is changing how the learner gets it.

While I sense this is probably where we want to go, I’m not sure if I’m ready for that level of development–yet. And, will Moodle be the tool that best allows or facilitates this?

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