that are not strictly prepackaged and offer instructors incredible freedom to design their courses. Both formats have inherent advantages and disadvantages, something we explore in this section.
Advantages of Prepackaged Learning
One advantage of a prepackaged curriculum, like the one Dana experienced, is its potential for offering teachers who are new to digital learning facilitation the opportunity to truly focus their attention on interacting with the students and optimizing the learning experiences. These curricula are not unlike a teacher in a traditional classroom receiving an outstanding lesson plan from a colleague. This said, it’s important to establish that, although the heavy lifting has been done, these curricula still require excellence in execution.
Prepackaged curricula are also advantageous because, in many cases, the instructional designers have unique design approaches, access to content, and the ability to utilize the institution’s support to procure some unique artifacts.
Let’s revisit our friend Dana, who struggled mightily in wrapping her head around the inflexibility of the curriculum, assessments, and even opportunities for intervention and collaboration. The truth is she did experience some pleasant surprises. An avid scientist, Dana thought that she had some very impressive resources collected for her students. To her delight, she discovered that her digital school had invested in some exclusive content developed in support of the famous science superstar Bill Nye the Science Guy. His digital content was illuminating. This, combined with some additional hard-to-find resources from National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution made Dana realize that, although the content was less flexible than she would have liked, the digital school had invested some meaningful resources in gaining access to some content artifacts that she never could have, either working alone or even with the best efforts of her local PLC.
A prepackaged, fully loaded, digital learning experience revolves around the ability to create immediate availability of a learning experience that a local school may be unable to provide. For example, if a student in Sheridan, Wyoming, wanted access to a level 5 Latin class, that school might be too small to offer such an advanced language. In these situations, the existence of a prepackaged curriculum may minimize the need for a specialized instructor who is available in Wyoming. It may allow an existing foreign language teacher, still a language expert, to teach a class that he or she may otherwise have a challenge preparing to teach.
Disadvantages of Prepackaged Learning
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