I’d thought about ignoring this one until AK posted Course Design Should Cost Zero…or Not. AK always ends with “your thoughts?” so I guess here I am.

I ran into the “kerfuffle” via Downes, although I also follow Crosslin, Wiley, AK, and used to follow Siemens although he’s moved around a bit since I read more of his work. Once he went to UTA and focused on learning analytics I’ve recognized he was in the network but I stopped paying close attention.

The recap of the situation is that Wiley posted about his work exploring LLMs for instructional design. The gist is that Wiley introduces Open Educational Language Models (OELMs), a system that combines generative AI with Open Educational Resources. OELMs use a modular architecture that separates learning content from learning activities, allowing them to be mixed and matched like HTML and CSS. The system includes content files with learning objectives and material, activity files describing different learning approaches, and a coordination service that combines them for the AI model. Wiley proposes two possible ways to interact with the system,

1. “The first we might call “exploratory.” Here the learner sees a list of courses, topics, and study activities, and chooses what to study and how.” and,
2. “The second we might called “designed.” Here the instructor or instructional designer pre-selects combinations of topics and activities and creates links to these bundles and places them strategically throughout the course.

These two points will be important for later. Back to the timeline of the blogosphere as I understand it.

I think next Siemens saw that post and another, providing a brief comment as he tends to do. (Emphasis mine below)

The emphasized part I’ll come back to as well.

Next up we had Siemens’ comment come up in Downes’ OLDaily newsletter, following the quote from Siemens with “My thought too.”

Matt Crosslin follows up with, “Course Design Should Cost About Zero”? What on Earth are George Siemens and Stephen Downes Thinking? largely critiquing the notion as it is dismissive of the expertise and effort instructional designers bring to course design. There’s an important nuance here s well.

This is where things kick up with a bit of back and forth. You can go read them yourself, I’ll wait.

Welcome back!

I could probably go into each post (and the ones that have come out since then) breaking down every little argument made, but we can back all the way up to the kernel of the debate instead. There are categorical errors that happen that none of these other posts address that make the rest of the discussion a bit of a moot point.

First, I didn’t see anywhere in Wiley’s post about reducing the cost of designing courses being reduced to zero. While, like others in this conversation I see where the HTML and CSS comparison is interesting it ultimately fails as a metaphor. The real kicker is when we get to the proposition of Siemens.

See, Wiley’s posts describes a spectrum of a course lifecycle from design, development, and experience (as in the exploratory option he sees as one option). Siemens then points to a post about how much it costs to build a course. Designing a course and building a course are two related but ultimately different things, and the linked article does parse some of that out. It would be like looking at the cost of building a skyscraper and then saying designing one should cost zero, and somehow expecting the same outcome of having a skyscraper. It’s not an equivalent comparison to make. You can see that design and build are related but distinct. For example, the design of a course might call for a specific job aid that details important information and conveys it in a certain way. The design doesn’t actually build (aka develop) the job aid. This is why we have ADDIE as the predominant paradigm in instructional design (not a model) as it distinguishes between all of these process pieces.  So right out of the gate the bigger conversation took this weird left turn.

So let’s consider for a moment Wiley’s second use case, an instructor uses the process or tool being proposed to design lessons or a course. Should this cost zero? Well let’s take this to it’s conclusion. The implication of Siemens’ statement is that faculty shouldn’t get paid for designing courses. We don’t even need to go to Crosslin’s critique, because the extreme majority of courses out there in universities have not had an instructional designer anywhere near them. For the most part, IDs are involved with online, distance, sometimes blended, and almost never face-to-face courses. If you take say any of the U15 institutions in Canada, the vast majority of courses offered are face-to-face. The folks that put the time and energy into designing, developing, and teaching those courses are faculty (or sessionals). Often this is required work and sorely compensated. But it is work, and compensated in some way (such as being able to teach the course they designed and receiving income for that). So would Seimens do this work for not cost to the university? Would he advocate to his peers that, yes, the work they do to design courses be given to the university at no cost? I’d love to be a fly on the wall for those conversations.

If you zoom out there is another problem with the proposition. I can’t track down any of Tony Bate’s writing about it, but an old colleague of mine that worked closely with him once mentioned that he considered the system costs when talking about offering courses. How much does heating the building cost? How much to build and maintain the technical infrastructure to offer an online class? Stipends, salaries, etc. of all the people it takes to make it happen (from registration through transcripts). Given the breadth of that, I would expect Batesto say we should also account for the cost of building, running, and maintaining an OELM as a cost for providing educational opportunities this way. The question might not be about what the cost is, but who pays it? It was open education week recently and there was a lot of talk about open textbooks. In traditional textbook settings universities don’t pay for the textbooks necessarily, the students do. Does this make the cost of the books zero? In other cases open textbooks are developed in specialized programming so student can get textbooks at no cost to them, but the authors are paid. Are these textbooks zero cost? In other cases, a faculty member embraces the idea of open textbooks and makes their own. Is the cost of this zero?

Long story short, it’s a ridiculous statement that gets off on the wrong foot to say course design should cost zero, and we’ve now all spent too much time on this instead of engaging with the original work meaningfully. So back to exploring how we can design and build opportunities for people to learn.

Update

I started this post with AK’s post and so maybe I’ll conclude with it as well, “In the end, no. Course creation should not cost zero. If you want someone to take care and effort in creating something useful, pay for it.” I agree, but I think it’s worth noting that this goes beyond should and should not. Course design won’t cost zero – certainly not in our lifetimes – because it can’t.

Photo by Reid Naaykens on Unsplash