Story Centered Curriculum

Professors talk. Students take notes. Then there is a test. Subjects are taught independently of each other in a strange smorgasbord approach that means graduates can barely remember what they learned the year before

The experience is passive, fragmented, unmotivated, and generally dull.

On line courses should not be replicating existing courses which were meant to handle large numbers and not meant to nurture students as they actually produce something and naturally learn by doing.
Socratic Arts has produced many on line full length masters degrees and even more short courses for various universities and corporations. These courses are always experiential in nature. They do not contain lectures or tests. However, they do require frequent deliverables from the students, and they emphasize teaching in the form of performance support provided by the course and mentoring provided, as needed, by the instructor to help a student to learn knowledge and skills as they are relevant to what he or she is doing.

The SCC calls for two types of mentors: learning coaches and subject-matter experts. A learning coach will motivate and channel the student in productive directions, helping the student to formulate strategies for assigned tasks and to identify opportunities for self-directed learning during the performance of a task.

• helps the author define a module structure with scenarios, tasks, deliverables, and learning resources, but not lectures, quizzes, and papers
• helps the author build an interview-based guide with examples that helps authors think about what those pieces should look like
• helps the author determine the deliverables to be produced by the student
• helps determine the story that provides the context for those deliverables
• helps determine sub tasks on the way to producing deliverable
• helps the author create fictional documents that start the work
• helps the author provide just in time help in the form of video experts
• helps the author provide just in time help from existing web sites
• helps the author provide just in time help in the form of a general plan of attack
  

Embedded in the tool are examples of all of these kinds of things, so that the author can use them as a guide as to what to create in the new course.
The tool itself helps the author to define an appropriate story of professional practice, including

• a set of top-level goals and problems
• a sequence of tasks necessary to achieve the goals and solve the problems
• a set of prioritized performance objectives for each task.
  

With the story defined, the tool then helps the author create the many detailed components of the course, including

• fictional documents for the course as a whole and for individual tasks
• fictional messages assigning tasks, in the form of emails or video scripts
• step-by-step guides for each task, with just enough detail to keep students on track
• links and references to appropriate learning resources, both online and physical
• embedded expert tips to address likely student mistakes at each step, in the form of texts or video scripts
• checklists to enable students to self-check their task deliverables before submission
• reflection questions for students to consider at the end of each task and of the course as a whole.
  

Source - Roger Shank

Questions

• At what scale can these things operate at?