See-through learning

One of the things I dislike greatly about many online learning environments is poor design. Students often complain that they cannot navigate easily around VLEs to find the links, tools or resources they need. They have to spend time thinking about how to get to a discussion group, or how to save content, when their energy and time should be spent learning. Some platforms are better than others of course, but generally many institutional managed learning environments suffer from the same problem - opacity.

I sat in a planning meeting today for our Faculty of Health at the University of Plymouth and one thing we were all agreed on was that courses delivered using any form of technology needed to be designed in such as way that students didn't have to struggle to make them work. In other words, students needed to 'see through' the technology and get to the learning quickly. Essentially, the more transparent the technology is, the easier the learner will be able to use it. The more opaque it is, the more difficult it is to navigate and therefore the harder it is for the learner to use.

In 2008, in partnership with Peter John, I published a book called 'The Digital Classroom'. I elaborated on the notion of 'opaque and transparent technology':

Technology that is opaque and requires a lot of investment in time, mental energy and effort will be rejected in favour of something easier. On the other hand, technology that is transparent is easy to use and has little demands on the cognitive energy of the user. Transparent technology is often referred to as 'user friendly' in that it allows the user to 'see through' the device into what it is able to do for them. (John & Wheeler, 2008; p 96)

We are talking here about minimising effort for maximum pay off - simple design of spaces such as ensuring that all links, guidance and information are in the same place, easy to see and easy to use. Now, that can't be so difficult, can it?

Reference: John, P. D. and Wheeler, S. (2008) The Digital Classroom: Harnessing Technology for the Future. London: Routledge.

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See-through learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.