ABSTRACT
We often surprise our instructional-design colleagues by saying that our approach to course design is to start with the course Web environment as empty as possible. Instead of designing a course around what we will present to the students, we spend most of our time devising and setting up the activities that the students will be doing. Based on this, we plan the support that we, the instructors, can offer, and in particular, we plan the assessment procedures. The key to this approach is the idea that the learning activities are based on what we call the contributing student approach (Collis & Moonen, 2002, 2005, in press). Through the process of their learning activities, the students contribute resources of various types to the course Web environment that are built on by all in subsequent learning activities and that result in a contribution that can be used by others. Sometimes the contributions are simple, for example, the students together build an internet links collection to be used as a resource for the rest of the course and updated by the students in subsequent cycles of the course. Other times, the contributions involve developing a report or product of some kind that represents an analysis from the student’s own experiences or research. The individual contributions become part of a collection that is then used by the
students for subsequent comparisons or other types of learning activities. Most interesting is when the contributions are integrated together into a resource that will be useful to an audience outside of the course itself. In the contributing student approach, the course Web site may start out being relatively empty, but it fills up quickly with the work and imagination that is shown in the contributions of the students. Assignments are not something to be put into a drop box in order to get a grade from the instructor; they are contributions that become learning resources for others.
