Moving Away from Lecturing toward Online Curating

Over Father’s Day weekend this past summer, my dad and I visited the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan. If you have ever been, you know it’s a massive campus. Our goal was to avoid the hot sun, so we stuck to the indoor exhibits only, allowing the winding paths of vintage cars to lead our steps. Far beyond what I expected, this museum devotes an entire section to math, celebrates the unique inventions of several generations (from nickel theaters to Nintendo Game Boys), and guides visitors through a multimodal maze of Americans’ varied journeys toward freedom. It was after I passed the hand-written copy of the 13th amendment, while listening to a reading of a previously enslaved woman’s narrative, that it struck me: this is teaching.

It may seem obvious – of course museums teach – but where is the teacher? Who is doing the teaching? Often, we associate teaching with the presence of a teacher and that presence is most commonly established through lecturing. But what opportunities might exist if we separated the teaching from the teacher? Let’s consider online asynchronous courses, for example.

In online asynchronous courses, students engage with the content on their own time, at their own pace, often in their preferred order, not unlike a museum visitor. Then there is the added challenge of online students attending their courses from any setting they choose. These variables can make it difficult for a pre-recorded lecture to have the same impact that it might have in a classroom, where a professor can engage students with questions and contextualized anecdotes. The best lectures just don’t land the same in an online asynchronous setting.

Instead, I invite online instructors to see themselves as curators. Rather than disseminate their expertise linearly, via slides and lengthy scripts, curators consider the following to engage their participants.

• Spatial rhetoric: how do I want learners to move through this content?
• Context: from where and when are learners viewing this content?
• Time: how long can I reasonably keep learners’ attention?

Curators bring together visuals, sounds, written text, and artifacts to lead learners through the most difficult concepts; they interpret and share content in ways that connect to the current moment. Curators of an online classroom can do the same, achieving (and possibly exceeding) their learning objectives by constructing modules that come alive through interactive media, embedded podcast clips, and visually compelling videos. Curators of an online classroom can also lean into the absence of lecture by calling for greater participation, prompting students to bring their own experiences to discussion boards and learn from one another through collaborative annotation activities and group projects.

With intentional design, and the resources available at the Instructional Design and Media Production Studio, instructors of online courses can develop multimodal lessons that capture their students’ attention, encourage them to draw from previous knowledge, and connect with their learning preferences. Most importantly, online instructors, or curators, can develop unforgettable learning experiences that will have students thinking about concepts months after they take the course, just as I continue talking with anyone who will listen about the museum I visited last summer.