Rethinking the role of time in learning design
The famous quaker William Penn once said when talking about time “Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst” and whether it’s through procrastination or a wandering mind it’s a sentiment that’s easy to identify with.
Individually we might reflect on our use of time and adopt strategies that seek to allay the frittering away of this most precious commodity.
But do we really reflect on time when it comes to how we learn and how we teach? Is our use of time on the side of learning?
Have you ever considered, really considered, why we have fairly rigid time divisions for teaching? Who decided upon the unit of time of 1 hour, 2 hours or more and why?
When you begin to consider this, you’ll struggle to find a rationale, deep reasons or evidence that substantiates this approach. It actually all feels completely arbitrary.
But it’s ingrained into formal and informal education contexts. We unthinkingly and unquestionably carry on teaching and learning in time divisions without a strong underpinning, it’s just how it’s always been done.
When we think about designing for learning, time is absolutely fundamental and critical in all respects, as is how we incorporate time into our design.
Challenging traditional formats through false dichotomies
Despite it still being the prevailing approach there’s now plenty of people that are of the view that a 1, 2 or 3 hour lecture doesn’t seem the most conducive and effective way to teach and learn.
Typically, this is because these types of teaching activities are understood to mean an educator communicating with students for most or all of that duration.
But, the reasons people often cite in the case against, do at times seem a bit parroted and based on creating a simplistic dichotomy of active and passive learning, or to put it another way listening and doing.
This I think, is a false dichotomy that can lead to shallow thinking about teaching and learning, it can also create an unhelpful polarisation which really doesn’t get us anywhere other than two entrenched positions.
Now of course, dichotomies are helpful for us to understand distinctions but the problem with many that exist in education is that they can quickly come to lack any nuance and become misconstrued mantras.
An educator introducing, explaining, describing, conveying information, concepts, processes, arguments is a fundamental part of the educational process.
So the issue is not that these things are bad and need to be eradicated, but rather that the time we allocate to these things and the amount we cover is often not thoughtfully and intentionally designed.
Put simply — the design or intentional use of time contributes hugely to the creation of a context and environment that is most conducive to ultimately result in learning rather than confusion, frustration or a sense of inadequacy.
The intersection of time, attention, and working memory
One of the key interrelationships between time and teaching is attention and working memory. The time that we can actively pay attention erodes rapidly and our extremely limited working memory can quickly become overloaded the more we’re introduced to new knowledge, ideas, concepts etc.
So if we’re going to design learning and teaching in a way that works for learners we need to think deeply about how time spent teaching intersects with attention and working memory, otherwise our endeavours may ultimately prove futile or inadequate.
A lot of the focus of the design of time in learning inevitably falls on the amount of time we can listen and pay attention - so long lectures and long videos are often advised against on the basis of attention.
The same though, can apply when things are taught or communicated in writing and when you add this to what we know about behaviours in terms of how we read online — then much care is needed in editing and presenting information.
What really needs to be read? What are seductive details? How can plain, accessible language be used rather than unnecessarily complex formation?
Do we also need to really reflect on reading lists too? Vast, decontextualised material that are easy to compile but can sometimes do little for learners, other than cause confusion and consternation.
Time, practice and space in teaching & learning
Another important aspect of the relationship between time and teaching is not simply how much we present at any given time, based on the limits of attention and working memory, but also how teaching and learning is spaced or sequenced out over time.
People rarely advocate cramming as an effective learning strategy but when it comes to teaching our approach can seem uncomfortably analogous to that.
Are we giving students enough time to practice, discuss, reflect, engage in formative activities and other activities in between blocks of teaching or content? Or counterintuitively allowing for some forgetting to occur and some effortful retrieval to be needed, something that is known to be beneficial for learning.
Unfortunately, sometimes the question is simply — are we even designing in activities that lead to effortful, effective learning or simply delivering content and leaving the rest to learners? But that’s another matter entirely.
If we want our use of time to be profitable then thoughtfully and intentionally designing teaching and learning so that it is spaced out over time rather than massing it into long sessions of arbitrary determined lengths of time should be one of our foremost considerations.
The flexibility of time and place that online learning provides affords one of the best opportunities to break the chains of time placed on learning and teaching, particularly through asynchronous means.
There’s greater potential to design based on what we know about how we learn and on the merit of what’s being covered. We can more effectively seek to manage cognitive load by how much we cover and not be led by arbitrary time divisions.
We can design the sequence of a course to help promote spaced learning and practice and therefore bring effective learning strategies and teaching closer together.
Embracing design to tackle the challenge of time
So how might you start to do this? Well the first thing may just be a mindset shift from — this is what I want to cover — to how much should I cover now and how much should I cover later? Or thinking about this in another way, putting yourself in the shoes of the learner.
As an extension of this, particularly if you have material already designed for longer chunks of teaching such as 1 hour — then surfacing the connections and segmenting this will help. We split up content and information all the time whether through paragraphs, headings, length of videos and spacing text messages, it’s a similar spirit here.
This is the thought-work of designing for online learning and why working with others is critical, a designer can help see your material through fresh eyes, but perhaps most importantly through the eyes of a novice not an expert. We’re all blindsided by our knowledge and have a bias towards how we’ve learnt or approached things, so working with a designer helps mitigate this.
Another way to think about this is also how you convey information — so it’s not just a case of segmenting content — but actually thinking about how you convey it and explain it to manage cognitive load, essentially how can you most efficiently and effectively explain, describe, introduce etc what you intend to cover.
Thoughtfully utilising dual coding, the powerful combination of images and words that Paul Kirschner and Mirjam Neelen referred to as “double barrelled learning” as well as drawing on things like metaphor and analogies to support what you’re explaining and concrete examples can also help enormously.
The key concept in all of what I’ve said here is design — the development of form through analysis.
As educators and designers we cannot afford to be indifferent about time — whether that be in addressing the old or taking on the challenge of the new.
The last thing we want is to move from one arbitrary time division to another shorter one, so we need to challenge and continually reflect on our conceptions of time in education and make it an integral not a perfunctory part of the design.
