There is a disturbing trend in U.S. education toward rigid pacing — “every student will be on page x on day y” — with a goal of controlling the “fidelity to the curriculum” and somehow ensuring quality. I think that’s a terrible idea and antithetical to learning, especially in terms of differentiating instruction for individual learner needs.
In my P2PU Entrepreneurial Marketing course, as with most other online courses I’ve participated in, I’m seeing that even less rigid pacing isn’t working well. The further we get into the course (we are now in week 4), the more the group is in different places. (This also happened in David Wiley’s first open ed class, where at some point the class revolted and insisted that we slow down to have more processing and reflection time.)
Like most online classes, my marketing course is organized by week. I’m wondering though what would happen if you organized a course like this by topic instead of week and just let everyone go at the pace that made sense for them.
My usual concern would be that doing so would make meaningful collaboration and peer learning very difficult. How can participants discuss a given topic if everyone’s at a different place? However, with the number of enthusiastic participants I have in this course, I don’t think that would be a problem. (Even now, people are still posting on week 1 forum assignments.)
Another concern I might have is that without the tension of a schedule to maintain, the course might lose momentum altogether with no one reaching the end. Again, this is less of a concern with the course I’m teaching now, but I think this may be a somewhat unique situation.
So my question for you — would a P2PU course organized by topic and not week and with total flexibility in terms of schedule work? What would be the advantages? What would be the disadvantages? Could this work?
Anyone want to try it?