The 21st century has seen a large scale migration of goods and services from the physical to the digital world. Accompanying this transition at nearly every corner has been skeuomorphic product design, the practice of retaining design elements that were functional in an earlier version. Skeuomorphism is why the recycling bin on your desktop still looks like a real trash can, it’s why your mobile phone camera makes a shutter sound when you snap a photo, and it’s why your electric tea kettle is probably wider at the bottom (for maximum contact with a non-existent heat source) and has an accentuated handle (to keep your hand away from a non-existent flame).

Skeuomorphism is not inherently good or bad. As Nicholas Gessler wrote in his 2005 article “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms”, skeuomorphs “provide us with familiar cues to an unfamiliar domain, sometimes lighting our paths, sometimes leading us astray.”[1] At its best, skeuomorphic design makes the Amazon Kindle comfortable and familiar — mimicking print in some instances, while improving upon it in others. At its worst, skeuomorphic designs “become a crutch and a way to justify lazy design decisions.”[2]

But there is more at stake in skeuomorphic design than just user experience. Duke University Professor of Literature N. Katherine Hayles points out that skeuomorphs often serve as “threshold devices, smoothing the transition between one conceptual constellation and another.”[3] While this suggests that skeuomorphs can help orient users in new settings, it also implies that they carry a great deal of weight in determining which habits society maintains as technology advances.[4] John Payne explicates these implications well in his 2013 article Does Skeuomorphic Design Matter:

“Skeuomorphs in design aren’t useless decoration, but contextual clues. Like design metaphor, they are the visual equivalent of figurative language — enabling designers to quickly tap into shared cultural understandings and convey complex meanings in a straightforward way. They work as a new kind of affordance…that provides the context we need to understand the possibilities for action. They work because they leverage a user’s past experience and apply that understanding to something new.”[5]

If the implications of skeuomorphic design are greater than good or lazy UX (and serving as cultural touchstones that dictates how a user acts in society certainly seems greater than good or lazy UX), then designers must incorporate both the aesthetic and cultural considerations into their design. This is especially true when the end product is not a tea kettle or shutter sound, but education.

Though online learning has been around for decades, it has been thrust into the national spotlight in the past three years as top institutions have come to stake their claim in the virtual world via MOOCs. By and large, each of these platforms have been designed to retain the look and feel of traditional higher education. Users sign up for classes that begin on a specific day. If they pay close enough attention to the lectures, they will do well enough on a number of short assessments to gain them a certificate of completion. Professors, now digitized, hold information and broadcast it out to the masses who have little recourse to interact, either with the professor or their classmates[6]. While the platform has changed, the method of delivery has largely remained unchallenged.

Amidst the transition and growth of online learning, Mitch Resnick at the MIT Media Lab decided that he wanted to offer his course Learning Creative Learning online. The structure of LCL runs counter to much of the pedagogy mentioned above; LCL is a hands-on course that relies heavily on peer-learning as means to learners’ constructing their own knowledge. Without an obvious platform to support LCL online, the Learning over Education Initiative at MIT built one.

We eliminated a start date and sign-ups, put all of our content online for free, and worked to shape activities and discussions so as to advantage of collaborative, open-source software like Unhangout, and Discourse. What we are left with doesn’t look much like a traditional course at all, yet it still retains what we believe are the essential elements of an empowering learning experience in the digital age — interesting questions, tools to help participants construct their own knowledge, and access to likeminded individuals. Furthermore, if collaboration, openness, creativity and empowerment are ideals we seek to cultivate in our learners, then we can rest well knowing that we’ve built a platform along those same principles.

There are thousands of years of precedent for understanding what good learning looks like, yet unfortunately it has been largely brushed aside by at least the major players in the past few years of online learning[7]. As more and more “education” gets digitized, educators and technologists must take the time to not thoughtlessly copy and paste the status quo onto a webpage. It’s vital to recognize that, in doing so, there are implications far greater than just ugly templates and anachronistic sitemaps.

[1] Gessler (2005). Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2FBFb0040776#page-1

[2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669879/can-we-please-move-past-apples-silly-faux-real-uis

[3] http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/03/ideas-bank/clive-thompson

[4] Gessler (2005). Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2FBFb0040776#page-1

[5] http://uxmag.com/articles/does-skeuomorphic-design-matter

[6] See Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the implications of top-down knowledge transfer, or what Freire calls the banking model of education.

[7] There are, of course, many wonderful exceptions, many of which originated north of the 49th parallel.