The Dreadful Content Bucket

In my last post I talked about the dangers of content-centric thinking in learning design, and I thought maybe that needed a little more explanation.

Quite often a blended learning design conversation becomes about the ‘content bucket’: a collective term for all the information that various stakeholders want to put into a course. And this is normally where things start to go wrong: firstly, content by itself is useless – it is only the affective context that will make it stick long enough for it to do any good and unless sufficient consideration is given to this we are just travelling the Ebbinghaus curve for the billionth time.

But the point I wanted to make is more subtle: neither of us – not the face-to-face team nor the online team should be thinking about content. The face-to-face/workshop team should be framing thinking in terms of experiences (since that is what they are best able to deliver) and the online team should be thinking about resources/tools (since this is what they can deliver).

This is not just semantics: a workshop learning experience might be a role-play, a discussion, an opportunity to practice. In short, the kinds of experience that provide affective context (I’ve started categorising these in The Learning Field Guide). In sharp contrast the online team are responding to context – providing tools & resources that meet immediate concerns.

Now you might think that these ‘tools and resources’ are just ‘content’ – and you would be wrong. A checklist is not content, an app is not content. And it is here that the meaning of content becomes clear: when we talk about learning content the hidden assumption is that this is information that people will need to store ‘in their heads’, and we immediately begin thinking of different ‘channels’ for the delivery of this content. So my practical suggestion is that we take the ‘content bucket’ off the table in our early design conversations and talk instead about the changes the business would like to see, and how we can involve and support people in getting there.