In the context of a book on Instructional Design, David R. Krathwohl in 1983 said of teaching machines and programmed learning: -
"Education was to be revolutionised. But that has not happened. Though the tantalising promise of these ideas remains, both teaching machines and programmed instruction have yet to achieve substantial educational roles"
Thirteen years on and the current state of affairs is not much different. We must ask ourselves 'why?' One possible reason could be Computer Aided Learning's (CAL) design methods or, more accurately, the lack of them.
"...compared to what it should and will be, today's interactive software is wooden, obtuse, clumsy and confused. The pervasive lack of imagination and good design is appalling." (Nelson 1990)
If any formal design methods are employed in CAL , it has been a top down decomposition approach, like early software engineering methods; overall educational aims are identified for the learning package and from these learning objectives are derived. These objectives are further subdivided until each objective can be directly implemented by a single teaching instruction. This paper suggests that the underlying model of the teaching and learning process in these design methods is not appropriate for higher education and proposes Laurillard's conversational framework as a more suitable model.
Diana Laurillard's "conversational framework"(Laurillard 1993) takes a different approach to the teaching and learning process; the framework identifies twelve activities that should be performed by the teacher and student for each learning objective. This approach acknowledges that learning is not reliably caused by any single type of teaching event. As the name suggests the "conversational framework" promotes a conversation or dialogue between student and teacher, and a more interactive view of teaching and learning.
The conversational framework is used as the basis for a review of thirteen CAL packages, mainly from an institutional Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). This paper details how the reviews were conducted, presents the results of the reviews indicating which activities in the framework are commonly supported in existing CAL packages and how they are implemented.
Krathwohl, D. R. (1983). Foreword. In C. Reigluth (Ed.), Instructional-Design Theories and Models:An Overview of their Current Status. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Laurillard, D. (1993). Rethinking University Teaching, a framework for the effective use of educational technology. Routledge.
Nelson, T. H. (1990). The right way to think about Software Design. In B. Laurel (Ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Addison-Wesley.