The Trouble with Curation

My client frowned, studying the courses she could leverage for a new learning journey.

"It’s getting a little…frustrating – I mean, challenging, to make new courses by curating modules and materials from other courses. They just – they aren’t a perfect fit."

I nodded and agreed. I’d come to the same conclusion.

It’s a frustration many of us confront when trying to build learning journeys that leverage "all the courses that already exist." The desire to reuse content makes sense. It’s efficient – a lot of time, effort, and expertise has been put into those materials. As companies look to standardize curricula and learning journeys for regions of the world or even globally, of course they want to leverage what they already have.

But then the challenge begins: Learners who are training to do a job well require a holistic view of the job to be done, as well as deep dives into specific skills. And yet, the leverageable modules and materials often tackle the required skills in bits and pieces, topic by topic. Learning professionals often are left with a constellation of fragments that don’t provide a holistic perspective.

Subject matter experts informing the new learning solution often add to the pressure to deconstruct holistic experiences into topics. They will direct learning designers to address a litany of topics grouped into themes. Perhaps experts think in terms of topic lists because learning by topic is how they were taught in school, but that doesn’t mean a topic-based approach will help people learn, develop skills, or create behavior change. In any case, research suggests experts’ thematic perspective doesn’t match that of novice learners 1

As with tennis, a learner needs to try to play in a game setting but also needs to work on skills separately, and then bring those back into the “game.” Interleaving in this way, with gradually increasing complexity, creates effective learning journeys.

As I commiserated with my client about the curation challenge, I was reminded of a white paper Dr. Roger Schank, Ph.D., CEO of Socratic Arts and founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, wrote some years ago to convince university faculty there was a better way to design a professional master’s degree curriculum.

I emailed the white paper to my client, who quickly responded, "I read the first three pages and am hooked! …actually 'LOL'-ing! I really appreciate you finding and sharing this." Her reaction made me think, "We can’t be the only ones experiencing the challenge." The paper is not new, but it’s as timely as ever. We thought others might appreciate it, too.

As for my client and me, we decided that for her project, all the existing courses and materials could be useful as performance support, but little to nothing was usable as complete modules.

Here's why we reached our conclusion: Learning by doing has always been the best way to learn. People need to learn through authentic hands-on practice to develop complete mental models of the task and the complexities of skill application in context. This can be through courses, apprenticeships, or a mix. Once learners have had a robust, authentic experience, they can do more isolated, deep-dive skills practice in more isolated ways as well, but they should apply those skills in context soon afterward.

nce upon a time, there was a kingdom that was overrun with dragons. The people were terrorized by the dragons, so they decided to build a new curriculum in their finest university to train young warriors in the art of dragon slaying. The university they selected had a faculty that knew many different things that would be of potential use to a dragon slayer, so the faculty met and formed a curriculum committee to establish a master’s degree in Dragon Slaying. The committee drew on all the wisest faculty in the university, so it had faculty from the arts and faculty from the sciences. There were business faculty and law faculty and medical faculty. The engineering faculty was represented and so was the humanities faculty. Surely from such an erudite group, the best and the brightest could instruct those who wished to learn how to slay the dragon.

At the curriculum-planning meeting, everyone agreed that each faculty member had something important to contribute. The business faculty was concerned that potential dragon slayers understand how to finance a dragon slaying expedition and know how to create a business plan to market the story and lessons derived from a successful voyage. The engineering faculty wanted to make sure that the student warrior would know how to read maps, build bridges where needed and launch missiles. The humanities faculty realized that dragons could be reasoned with and proposed a course in how to speak Dragonese and how to negotiate with dragons. The legal faculty was concerned with dragon rights and potential lawsuits and suggested a course in law for the neophyte warriors. The arts faculty wanted to make sure that the public would be able to see what the dragon looked like and suggested the use of photography and drawing courses. The scientists wanted to know about the habitats and evolutionary history of the dragon, and therefore proposed teaching a basic course in evolution and biology to the students in the program. The medical faculty was concerned that students might not know how to kill the dragon properly if they failed to understand how dragons were constructed.

As it happened, this university was the most prestigious one in the land. Consequently, its faculty were very busy working on government funded research projects and on traveling around the world giving invited speeches as well as consulting to business. They didn’t really like to teach all that much, and they hated to have to develop new courses because these were a lot of work. They were willing to develop some new courses, but new courses for master’s students were never a priority. They each decided to choose courses from existing curricula that would be appropriate for the novice dragon slayers. In this way, students would get a broad education that would serve them well. When they finished, this was the curriculum they chose:

Dragon Slaying First Semester	Dragon Slaying Second Semester
Introduction to Dragonese	Introduction to Dragonese II
Basic Legal Concepts	Civil Liberties and Animal Rights
Introduction to Photography	Introduction to Drawing
Introduction to Anatomy	The Anatomy of Dragons
Strength and Materials	Projectile Physics