Why I Chose to Scaffold

and how to avoid ‘show-and-tell’ in your learning design.

In my experience as a Learning Designer, I’m often tasked with redesigning a course that has been taught a certain way by subject matter experts (SMEs) for years. These are commonly lecturers and business leaders who know what they’re talking about when it comes to their subject, but not necessarily when it comes to sharing their knowledge online. As a result, I have noticed that there are certain tools that I use frequently and would like to share them with other Learning Designers here.

One of the first tools I reach for is scaffolding.

Scaffolding takes students through different learning activities so that they can move progressively toward a stronger understanding of a concept, or toward achieving a learning outcome (LO).

For example, when I was designing a course to guide students on their professional pathway, one of the learning outcomes was to ‘write a mission statement’:

I knew I could have easily done a “Show-and-Tell” of sorts, and simply provided an approved definition of a mission statement, given some examples of a mission statement and then asked the students to come up with their own — hoping that they would be able to do so.

But what could happen, then, is this: they ask Uncle Google. Or copy it from somewhere else. What they might end up doing is taking someone else’s mission statement instead of coming up with their own.

So, how do I ensure that they’ll take a step back and come up with their own meaningful mission statement? I usually do this by taking them through some of my go-to scaffolding activities (don’t worry if the screenshots aren’t working—each image is hyperlinked to the relevant page and you can check out the course at Land Your Dream Job: OpenLearning Portfolio):

Scaffolding Example #1: Portfolio Course

First, I play a game of “How can you not like that!” with them:

Then, I ask them for details — but I don’t want them to know that what they’re really giving me is key words that they’ll be using in their mission statement, so I ask them about ‘the little things’ instead:

Now, comes the real exercise: identifying the keywords that they will include in their mission statement. To do this, I ask them to connect their day-to-day lives with what they’ve been sharing in the course:

By completing the activities above, students are taken on a journey that allows them to reflect without thinking too hard about coming up with their mission statement. Once they have focused on what they like to do best, they are ready to write.

Finally, at this point, I’m ready to show them some examples of mission statements:

And ultimately, they are ready to write their own:

Why do I choose to do it this way?

There are no right or wrong answers for these activities. Imagine if we had gone with the “Show-and-Tell” approach: they would not have experienced the level of ambiguity that is necessary in crafting a meaningful mission statement.

To me, this is one way to get the students to progressively understand what the topic at hand is all about.

Scaffolding Example #2: ARVR Course

The other way to look at scaffolding is to take students on an incremental journey, not just in one or more activities, but throughout the course. To do this, I’d first ensure that the course learning outcomes are able to support this incremental journey. For example in the AR/VR: The Promise of Sci-fi course, the outcomes stated are:

Looking at the outcomes above and from the discussion with the SME, I knew that the students would need to master outcome 1 before they could achieve outcome 2, and so on.

So, I put my scaffolding hat on and came up with this:

There are two parallel streams:

• the ‘Learning Activities’ stream
• the ‘Let’s Get Working!’ final project stream.

At different stages in the first stream, students will be required to ‘jump’ to the second stream and complete the steps that will lead them to the final project. By completing the second stream, all the outcomes will be achieved.

For example, by completing Module 1 of the Learning Activities stream, students are prepped to complete Step 1 of the Let’s Get Working stream.

At the end of the ‘Redefining Entertainment’ page, we prompted them to ‘jump’ into the brainstorming activity with this button:

Once they had completed the activity, they were prompted to ‘jump’ back to the first stream to continue with Module 2:

What led me to use scaffolding in this way?

Learning outcomes. The LOs for this course lend themselves to a scaffolding approach that can be applied across the entire course. Students were required to master Skill A before they could confidently progress to Skill B.

Compare this to the Portfolio course, where each LO could be achieved on its own, and in any order. Students don’t need to develop Skill A before Skill B, although each of the skills build on one another.

What makes scaffolding such a powerful tool?

With scaffolding, instead of introducing a final project at the end of a course, students have already started working on the final project since the beginning of the course. This way, students are able to progressively develop all of the skills required, while having the opportunity to revisit previous steps and reflect or improve as necessary.

I’ve shared just two of the many ways that I’ve used the scaffolding approach in designing a course. Have you tried this approach before? How have you used it?

I’m always an advocate for Learning Designers sharing different ideas and experiences, as that’s how I’ve learned as well. So, do share if you’ve used scaffolding in your online course design or gotten any new ideas on how to use it.

Keep calm and design on!