As Ph.D. students of the Learning, Design, and Technology program, our blog posts here in the GA Fellows site often discuss learning theory, technologies, and even our personal experiences. But with this post, I wanted to outline a design idea for online Ph.D. courses. This is one of those eventualities the marketplace is pushing for. Not to mention the apartheid issue of socio economic issues, accessibility, and even just the theory of “diffusion of innovation” by E.M. Rogers. Online learning will appear in all forms. This course design spurs from an honest experience with the graduate school. Mind you, I was an oddball in undergraduate, and took a graduate level course my first semester of University. I just didn’t know better, and the class fit my schedule at the time. Next confession, I went ahead and read for the first time, the Ph.D. handbook after two years of the Ph.D. program. No real excuses but life got in the way. But life also has a way of making you do things, too. I did have the handbook for the past two years, and I opened it, too. But I cherry picked the information and this where I realize my problems arise. A Ph.D. program is like nothing else I experienced in the realm of formal education and the expectations are very different.

In previous research on adaptive platforms, I found the research showed curriculum design is a major factor in online course. Technology can do a lot, but the human factor of collecting, organizing, and developing activities to stimulate and assess learning is paramount. This is where a creative curriculum design comes in. But what does this have to do with a Ph.D. program. A Ph.D. students needs to engage in residency, and exhibit collaboration, cooperation, project management, and critical thinking skills with the purpose of creating new knowledge while working on a research project for their professor, classmates, and while figuring out their research direction.  AND we have to publish along the way! By the way did mention we have to take classes and learn the domain we are studying! This is a huge amount of knowledge to consume and a gargantuan amount of work performance we are supposed to achieve. We are only human, and everyone told me to take short cuts. The shortcuts I am talking about are reading the intro and then reading the conclusion of an article. This is even taught in GRE preparation training. Read the intro, read the conclusion, and follow with reading the middle part so that you can actually finish the timed GRE test. This is about time and scalability and not learning. There is an issue with this method in my opinion. But I am only a PhD student, so take it with a grain of salt.

Let us look at the order of reading, because if you read the intro, and then you read the middle supporting facts, you are actually building the knowledge or scaffolding that knowledge as intended. I think is probably a deeper form of learning based on my ideas of how learning may occur. See my next post on this idea: Integration of Learning and Instruction across all Learning Environments

Incidentally, if you read the conclusion after the introduction you are basically accepting a fact, before the support. Often in graduate school you skip the middle all together. My favorite assignment once was just read the methods of the articles to explore methods used in research. Sounds good, right? Let me explain my train of thought. If you’re accepting research as fact, this is the opposite of critical thinking. Research is new knowledge building on old knowledge. This means we are building a puzzle to answer question after question on an ever-expanding topic. So each piece of research is a perspective. Yes, this is sounding a bit like ”Community of Inquiry”. I could even throw in the “Quantum Learning Theory” and really confuse everyone. But I am going to keep this practical and you can read about those two theories on your own as the sources are below.

While learning you take in new information and combine it with your prior knowledge. If you don’t synthesize the new information with your prior knowledge, Cognitive Dissonance may occur, but with two alternatives, separate distinct facts or frustration till you synthesize the new acquired information.  Distinct fact suddenly has no relation to any other knowledge and is memorized, or rote learning. The alternative is frustration and anxiety from the knowledge being so dissected. Maybe this is why graduate school is so stressful? But I digress. When reading the conclusion this just tells you what the authors’ conclusion is, and not yours.  Even if you read the middle part, reading the conclusion first, places an “observer-expectancy effect bias” on you, the reader. And yes, the concept of implying “peer reviewed” is the same bias. This closes us off to new ideas, perspectives, and approaches. When you read the conclusion before the support you’re not contextualizing and synthesizing the new information to your prior knowledge and determining your own thoughts on the topic or subject. This leads me to an issue with this whole concept. If we are doing research to discover new knowledge, but knowledge is created when we acquire existing knowledge and synthesize it to our prior knowledge to allow new knowledge to evolve, then reading the conclusion and creating a bias, this is self-defeating! My point is, we should read the entire article from beginning to end and be critical about the explanation of the research. But this requires time and student discipline in their approach to learning and critical thinking! Side note: it is mentally exhausting to be this way.

So, here is the curriculum design, which only accounts for controlling the time factor. We as the facilitators of instruction cannot dictate how the learner chooses to approach the content they are learning, whether it is with a shortcut or with intentional critical thinking. But we can explain to our students what the objective is and how this course design will benefit them and their careers.

And to offer a warning, no student should take this same type of course design full-time. Three of these courses would be a huge cognitive load, if the students were attempting to be disciplined and diligent in their critical thinking. Plainly put, its A LOT of work.

Class curriculum idea:

16 week course

1-6 weeks:

each student reads one article a week from beginning to end, and blogs critically about the article. A summary is NOT sufficient. As a graduate student, one should be working towards analyzing, evaluating, with the goal of creating. The goal is the student is to read the article and critique and debate the claims. Next, they must compare or combine in some divergent way with other sources of knowledge, outside the domain. Find a pattern of themes, or find questions not addressed not addressed in the reading. Also, associate it to a personal experience in the blog. These personal experiences help the student reflect and synthesize the readings to a body of prior knowledge. Note: APA is not crucial at this point.

6-12 weeks:

place the students in groups of 3-4, and the students have to read each others blogs, and give each other constructive criticism and provide sources. Clear guidelines are necessary to address the content and ideas when providing criticism, such as questioning how they use terms or define their thoughts on the blog response. The students should not address the personal aspects of the post, unless they provide a body of factual evidence to arouse discussion on the subjects. Citing sources starts to become crucial at this stage. So, students should attempt apply APA styled references and or provide links and traceable sources to cite in their responses.

13 week:

These groups will select one blog post and use the sources to evolve the ideas into a collaborative/cooperative group article. More sources can be added during this week. Also, this is where students will question and debate sources. This may seem to be a lot to do in one week. But, students, whether in an online class or face-to-face course should be able to meet with each other once or twice to discuss the body of work that has already been done in the previous weeks.

14-15 week:

Complete writing the article; and finalize the new knowledge understood. With collaborative cloud based technology, writing a paper should be achievable. Sections of the content can be cooperatively assigned and then collaboratively reviewed and followed with collaborative edits.

16 week:

submit to journal to be reviewed. Selecting a journal, and modify the article to fit the format requirements of this journal is all that is needed. Providing a source guide of journals in the students field with some domain interests associated to the field should help the student. Doing a goolge scholar search should be avoided at this point. As a graduate student, they are trying to learn the knowledge, how to build new knowledge in a collaborative/cooperative settings, and don’t need to take the time to hunt and search for a journal. This is where the students usually go to their advisor for advice on where to publish and rely on their experience. But this robs the student of their independence and autonomy. Not to mention, an hour in an academic professors life is very valuable and the professor may want to be included on your article, once again, resulting in a loss of the student’s autonomy.

Our GA research group has built a sample resource for our field and interests. This is not a webpage, but a living resource for our research group. The hope is to add various conferences and publications we can publish in the future with. Please email us with any ideas of conferences and journals to add to the list.

Research Conferences and Journals

To conclude with a personal example and practice what I preach with my time in Art School. Developing an art project had every curriculum design beat, because every art project ended up with climbing Bloom’s Taxonomy almost every time, students had to be autonomous, creative, and the critique process often resulted in cry after the class critique decimated your project. This happened in art school all the time, because attempting to master all mediums was very difficult. Also, because art is an expression of the selfish. When I say selfish, it is about what the artist loves, enjoys, is communicating, in the process of creating something. Maybe self gratifying is a better word. But design is to meet the needs of others, with the purpose of designing something to communicate or influence others. We often forget this as Instructional Designers or Learning Designers. In Art school every assignment was this quest to create something divergent from what we learned about, and express ourselves through a medium and genre of a great artist before us. We flexed our creative muscles all the time. This is what a PhD student needs to do! And not just consume information or look for the deficit in the domain of one’s study. This idea is a big undertaking and to implement this graduate-level course curriculum design, it may require you to split one course into two or three based on the quality of the article chosen and the course topic. However, this is ideal course to challenge and prepare a PhD student for the residency requirements, and with the goal of create new knowledge and research, which is the purpose of a PhD program.

Disclaimer: this is just a design idea, which would require implementation and feedback from students to adjust the time frame of the work assigned. Also, students must understand, they would be using parts of the works cited lists from the articles and sources used in the assigned articles, where they derived or contextualized their ideas from. Additionally, placing in articles from foundational sources, and others they gleam. This timeline is not a didactic process, but a rough guide to elicit the pattern of work behavior an academic would engage in for a career in research. I do hope this inspires creative approaches to online PhD course activities. And please advise your instructors to grade kindly!

References:

Janzen, K. J., Perry, B., & Edwards, M. (2011). Aligning the quantum perspective of learning to instructional design: Exploring the seven definitive questions. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(7), 56-73.

Rogers, E. M. (2010). Diffusion of innovations. Simon and Schuster.