Good design is no longer enough. Online content must travel through two lenses before learners receive it: the content design and the technology, itself. Philosophy--specifically, postphenomenology--has the potential to help us better decide on best practices but also understand the learning experience at its core.
When using a device to participate in an online learning environment—or viewing any content, really—the user is faced with these two competing hermeneutic (interpretation) relations simultaneously. A desktop computer and a smartphone have their own particular affordances, limitations, and mediating qualities. Location flexibility, display real estate, ease and speed of a communication interface, just to name a few. The person is experiencing the world (in this case, let’s replace ‘world’ with ‘knowledge items’ as ‘world’ is the target of the traditional hermeneutic relation and the target of an online course is the ‘knowledge item,’ whether that’s knowing certain facts or achieving proficiency in one or another area). The device itself is mediating that experience. On top of this, the design of the online learning environment, learning management system, course webpage, etc., complicates that relationship as the user must then navigate another relationship with another mediation before arriving at that final destination, the knowledge items.
An example may help elucidate this. Let’s consider two classes, both fully online English 101 classes. Each of these classes is taught by the same instructor. They have identical content in that they teach the same topics, provide the same lecture notes, require the same assignments, and evaluate students using the same writing prompts. ‘On paper,’ these classes are identical. Now let us assume one of these classes suffers from incredibly poor course design. That is, the organization in the LMS is haphazard, fonts seem nearly random, images don’t align with text or even break text completely, content is organized into alphabetically listed topics rather than chronological modules or content areas. To make matters worse, the design itself is unresponsive, making the use of a mobile device to access the course content so difficult as to be virtually impossible (though still technically possible).
The other English 101 class is precisely the opposite: page layouts are consistent and visually pleasing; the images are thumbnailed; captioned, and linked to full-resolution versions; content is organized meaningfully, providing students with both a chronological schedule of topics and assignments while being duplicated in content-type collections (all readings listed together, for example). The website for this class is responsive and easy to navigate from any device, be it desktop computer or smartphone.
These two classes have entirely the same content with drastically different designs. How does this map to the hermeneutic relation diagram if we are to qualify students’ experiences? The technology used to access the content is the same but the content’s design fundamentally alters the experience of the user. Technically, both are still I -> ( Technology – World ) and, if we consider ‘world’ to mean the knowledge or skills the course content is designed to deliver, the classes are phenomenologically and hermeneutically identical. Far from it.