Design and Development - or Is it soup yet?
According to what I think I have learned about designing online courses and teaching in general, three types of interaction, student-student, student-teacher, and student-content, are the focal points for developing instruction.There are actually two more — teacher-environment, and student-environment. We tend to ignore the environmental issues when dealing with the classroom based courses because we’re so famliar with them. Automaticity makes it seem invisible most of the time, but it’s obvious in the beginning of the year or when there have been changes in the building from semester to semester. People are wandering around lost and not knowing what’s going on. The environmental interactions online are more apparent when you move into environments that are not familiar — like a new school, or online. If the affordances of the environment are not the same as what you’re used to, then that interaction becomes visible — largely thru frustration.
It is interesting that we (or at least “I” and the way I interpret much of what I am reading) tend to either ignore the educational environment or reference it as a mere byproduct of the traditional triangle of interactions. The idea of the PLE is one that allows us to both explicitly address this important, overlooked area and bring at least some of it back into the realm of intentionality. Not control– or at least not only and not complete control– of the environment, and not just creating a learning environment, but facilitating the students’ creation of their own environments, a critical part of learning communities and a foundation of the new third places, etc.