Skip to content

Consistency vs quality?#

See also: design, scale

"Consistency is king" is an apparently age-old mantra in industrial/institutional learning and teaching. It was there in the pre-Internet days in industrial distance education. It's increasingly big in institutional use of Learning Management Systems ( consistency-is-key-in-online-learning)

My argument is that such arguments tend to confuse consistency with quality. A confusion that arises because people and organisations can't seen any other alternative to achieve quality at scale. i.e. When dealing with 100s/1000s of course sites, it's easier to do the Ford assembly line approach and have everything the same. But, Clark & Dede (2009) argue that

One-size-fits-all educational innovations do not work because they ignore contextual factors that determine an intervention’s efficacy in a particular local situation.

Put down the shiny object#

Article from a Manager of Instructional Technology at a US-based institution. Which makes the argument for staff to make use of templates

Consider and embrace consistency for the sake of students. As a direct result of our student feedback, we developed Moodle templates in collaboration with campus leaders among the faculty and have had very positive feedback, especially from new faculty.

i.e. the aim is trying to get academics to adopt something the team has developed. Perhaps, if the academics aren't adopting it, there may be something wrong with the tool?

This conclusion arose from talking with students. Given the conclusion, there's no surpise that the summary of "what students told us" includes

The most reported major struggle was focused around inconsistent layouts from course to course, which led to confusion.

But, interestingly (IMHO), some of the expansion of this points to something slightly different

it’s important to note that when we asked them for good examples of Moodle use, students mentioned specific courses that did a good job organizing content in a way that was intuitive and easy to follow, had clear deadlines, and consistently posted grades.

What students liked was "courses that did a good job organizing content in a way that was intuitive and easy to follow". This is the ends. Consistency isn't the end. It's a means to an end.

The problem is that most course sites aren't like this. Now is this a problem arising from the limited digital competence of teachers, or perhaps the poor quality of the tools they are using?

Templates are useful in that they may reduce the effort/skill required to do something well. But they simply do NOT cater well for the diversity of learning and teaching.

See also#

[consistency-is-key-in-online-learning]: <../Paper Summaries/consistency-is-key-in-online-learning> "Consistency is key in online learning: Evaluating student and instructor perceptions"

[consistency-is-key-in-online-learning]: <../Paper Summaries/consistency-is-key-in-online-learning> "Consistency is key in online learning: Evaluating student and instructor perceptions"