Why Your Course Should Have a Linear Design

How to structure your online course can directly affect the success of your students and this structural difference is key to certain demographics.  In general, most college courses benefit from a linear structure because they are best received by their audience.  While some students may find a non-linear approach easier to find aspects of the course they are interested, as a designer, you should be concerned that a subset may miss needed components of the course.  Moreover, the structure may not relay any meaningful connections the content shares.

For example, imagine you are designing a course.  You create:

·       A folder for quizzes

·       A folder for tests

·       A folder with weekly readings

·       A folder with discussion boards

·       A folder with their current event assignments

·       A link to the publishers website for more material

Now, all the students have to do is read the 15 page syllabus to know what to do and find all the appropriate materials, and the course is done.

This design is easy for the faculty to create, but is not easy for the student to navigate. Determining what is due at any given point can be buried in a long syllabus and hard to find. The objectives are unclear or also difficult to find as well. Even if each folder has weekly headings, the students are required to constantly jump in and out of folders to navigate their learning in a meaningful way. To compound to this problem, there is no meaningful ordering or naming of the content to reveal how the content relates to each other.

Recipes include a step-by-step process precisely because they guide us though the process creating something. Shouldn’t course design be structured to guide the students through the process of learning?

The vast majority of college students taking online courses are not-self-motivated graduate students or post-docs, and several are new to the college learning experience. It is reasonable to assume that many of these students are not as highly disciplined. In schools with students new in online learning or educational technology or who have disabilities, e.g. certain community colleges have a rate as high as 1 in 4 who have meet this category, a linear model assists in their success. The lineal model also does not impeding other students’ progress. This is not true of non-linear models, as they often impede student success in all students who are not very self-regulated (McManus, 2000) and require extra guidance from the faculty over all for success with most students (Chen, 2002).

If you are designing courses for undergraduates, and particularly for students new to the college experience or that face specific learning obstacles, such as in community colleges, you should gravitate towards a simple linear course design.  It is not that a non-linear course design does not work.  You could achieve the same student success rate with a lot more work on your part as an instructor to overcome design issues that impede student understanding. However, isn’t adopting a design structure to do that work and contribute to student success what instructional design is all about?

References

Chen, S (2002) A cognitive model for non-linear learning in hypermedia programmes. British Journal of Educational Technology. 43(4) 449-460.

McManus, T (2000) Individualizing instruction in a web-based hypermedia learning environment: nonlinearity, advanced organizers, and self-regulated learners. Journal of Interactive Learning Research. 11(2) 219-251.