Library, classroom and action centre: design metaphors that shape pedagogy, roles and success criteria for online courses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moving courses online can amplify a pedagogy of compliance and result in an expensive development that resists change. Alternatively, moving online can expand the pedagogy, roles and success criteria for a course. The literature lacks multi-case analysis of complex online courses. This multiple case study uses activity theory to examine the development and adaptations of four online writing courses at universities in North America. The results suggest three design metaphors that predict expectations for criteria for success, pedagogical approach and development, and adaptability to change. A library metaphor focuses on isolated individuals studying packaged content and is resistant to change. A classroom metaphor focuses on facilitating interactions of students with existing content. In the library and classroom, moving online and responding to learner difficulties can amplify compliance pedagogy. In contrast, an action centre metaphor expands pedagogy and the roles of learners and their community by embracing collaboration, ongoing feedback and meaningful revision to address a community need. Design metaphors can be used to plan, categorize or evaluate online courses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".