A colleague posed this question: Should we be concerned that most of the instructional design models we consider for online education were conceptualized long before the internet was created?

My answer: No, we should not be concerned. Any useful instructional design model (or teaching methodology)—new or old—is based on the nature of learners and learning. And any effective model for online instructional design has the same starting point.

Like most educators, I generally adhere to the Vygotskian notion of social constructivism, that is, of the centrality of social interaction in learning. This aligns closely with my own voluminous experience as a learner and teacher.

The social-interaction nature of learning is most obvious in face-to-face instructional settings, but it is by no means limited to such settings, and hasn’t been for a very long time. Online teaching and learning is by no means the first great departure from the face-to-face instruction model. Indeed, our ability to transcend the limits of face-to-face learning is the central human achievement.

The earliest means of non-face-to-face communication between our distant ancestors probably began with the simplest of signs—cairns to mark a trail, say—which gradually evolved to more complex artifacts such as cave painting and petroglyphs. And then, starting around five millennia ago, humans began to devise ways to communicate and to store information and knowledge by inscribing meaningful symbols on a permanent medium. And this technology—writing—continued to be the primary mode of non-face-to-face communication for hundreds of generations, right up until the invention of the telegraph. (I believe it was Noam Chomsky who pointed out that the internet is essentially a refinement of the telegraph.)

Reading as a social activity

Reading is, after all, a form of social interaction. In reading a book, the reader is making a connection with the writer. Humans learn from other humans, whether that human-to-human connection is direct (face-to-face) or made possible remotely via technology (piles of stones, smoke signals, books, computer screens). The miracle of books is that they allow a direct asynchronous link between the minds of the writer and reader, they allow for the direct communication of complex thought and knowledge across time and distance and even mortality. Of course many of the elements that enrich face-to-face communication—nonverbal cues, in-person interaction, tone of voice, hands-on experiences, etc.—cannot be contained within a book, but the directness and potential depth of the cognitive connection between writer and reader compensate for this.

So it’s no surprise that for centuries the primary instructional technology was the book. This held true even as the rise of audio and visual recording presented new means of storing knowledge, and radio and television made it possible to disseminate that information in ways that had clear advantages over printed materials. These newer technologies played a role in teaching and learning, though importantly they never came close to supplanting the printed book, possibly because the book was more convenient to use (needing no equipment or electricity) and easier to integrate into the traditional, interactive, classroom-based model.

However, more recent technological advances—the internet and interactive online media—show signs that they might finally usurp the supremacy of the printed text. These technologies have become widespread and integrated into most people’s daily lives; being so convenient and ubiquitous means that they can be effectively purposed for teaching and learning.

For the past couple of decades when people talked about how the internet was going to utterly transform education, a common rejoinder involved trotting out predictions from the early and mid-20th century about how radio and then television were poised to do the same. And sure enough, those technologies failed to replace or even significantly change the traditional classroom and the centrality of the printed text in it.

A brave new world?

The internet, it seems now, may be a different case, sui generis. Operationalized via portable devices and platforms that facilitate mass interactivity, this technology has contributed to an enormous upheaval (the term of art is “interruption”) in print journalism, magazines, publishing—including textbooks—and in education.

From an educator’s perspective, the key word here is interactivity. That’s what makes the difference. Before today’s level of interactivity became possible, a lot of early online learning was based on the notion that you could just put “content” out there and let people ingest it. And to be sure, even now some people doing online instruction continue in that vein. More recent models, however, take a much more Vygotskian approach, emphasizing interaction among all the parties involved. My own evolving practice has moved toward more teacher-student interaction, while I continue to work on ways to foster student-student interaction that learners will find relevant and useful.

I don’t believe we’ve reached the point where online learning comes close to equalling the power of teaching and learning interactively in a classroom with books. But let’s keep in mind that the book/reader relationship developed over centuries, during which time the very evolution of human cognition was arguably shaped by reading (Carr 2010 provides a fascinating discussion of this). The online/user experience is only in its earliest infancy. And unlike books, which once established as a format remained almost unchanged for centuries, we’re now in a period where the technologies are changing in important ways, and fast. Maybe this process of change will level off or maybe it won’t, and maybe it will have profound effects on human cognition or maybe not; it’s too early to say. (My guess is Yes and Yes, respectively.) Either way, at the present it seems we spend a lot of our energy playing catch-up with new online capabilities. For example, when I first took an online course in the late 90s, there was no Wikipedia, no Youtube, no social media, no smart phones. Within twenty years the technical environment has shifted seismically, and shows little sign of slowing.

Overcoming overload: teacher as curator

For educators—online and otherwise—this seismic shift has changed one of our key tasks. Whereas historically the task of gathering instructional materials and content required a good amount of effort (as did finding viable sources as a student or scholar), today we can readily access materials online in quantities that can overwhelm and confound a learner. The biggest danger to learning is overload. Thus, one of the most important tasks of the online instructional designer is to serve as curator, to make judicious selections in order to reduce this tendency. Otherwise, the effect is of a teacher who shows up on the first day of class with a giant bin full of books and says, “Well, have a look at these, everything you need to know is in there.”

In fact, in most of the online classes I’ve taken—on the topic of online teaching methods and pedagogy, amazingly enough—this has been the approach: “Check out these 43 links….” And of course one discovers that 42 of them consist of materials not from recognized experts, not based on any sort of empirical study or serious review of literature, but instead are rather frivolous and dubious sources making unsubstantiated claims about “best practices” and such. In short, typical internet flotsam and jetsam, the sort of things that my English composition students come up with before we talk about how to find and evaluate legitimate sources.

This turn toward curation represents a significant change in the work of a teacher, and it’s clearly the result of recently emerging technologies. But it ultimately doesn’t change what’s been at the heart of teaching and learning for millennia: human interaction. Which means that we can’t make our pedagogical and instructional design choices on the basis of technology; we have to continue to think first about the learner and how learning happens. For this reason, models that were conceptualized long before online education arose continue to be relevant and useful.

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Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.