There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.

Using the TOC

For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized by a clear editorial hand.

Academia is quite text-based. While e-learning has become more and more popular, the learner need for a sense of understood structure and “anchor points” in learning means that many will rely on the inherent developmental structures of most textbooks to structure the online learning.

Quibbles with “Inherited” Textbooks

Unless the faculty member is the author of the textbook, most faculty have some quibbles with the books that they use for their courses. There may be a perceived political slant in the textual contents. The tone may be too colloquial or too formal. Information may be missing. One thing may be over-focused upon, and something else may have been under-played.

The choice of a textbook may depend on a departmental committee. It may be the sole decision of the faculty member. It may be directly inherited from an instructor who needs instructional cover. Many faculty do the due diligence of getting free texts and evaluating them for “fit” to their teaching style and students. Many go even further and will review texts in their draft stages to offer suggestions to the authors and editors to improve the text and make it more usable for their various purposes.

Pre-Built Structures

Students who pay the fairly expensive prices for books (even those that are used) often want the contents of an entire book covered. They will sometimes express frustration if only a portion of a text is covered. While many faculty will address pieces of a text “out of order,” many do rely on the central structure of a text for coherence.

The faculty members will add supplemental learning through additional readings, assignments, field trips, modules, and student projects, to make up for perceived gaps in a text.

As with any other strategy, there are pros and cons to this. Pros may involve having a built-in structure and conceptual model of the field, inherited by an author (or authors) and editors who have a stake in this field.

However, textbooks may be expensive and not fully up-to-date. They’re not as stylish as some other ways of capturing knowledge. Some students try to skip textbook use altogether in their courses. Textbooks may have a rigid structure that is not truly indicative of a field. Over-reliance on one or two sources may be intellectually limiting. Those texts that instructors have used for decades may be out-of-date, or even out-of-print except for some used book providers.

Or Not

Much online learning is moving away from textbooks or going with reader packs made up of a variety of contemporary readings or going with electronic books. Other instructors are doing without textbooks and lectures, and instead, they’re relying more on student collaborations and communications as well as the WWW as a general space for learning. Some are building courses from dozens of resources, some of them free and open-source, some commercial, and some self (institution)-created. For some, having a structure isn’t all that necessary, and given that so many learners are not necessarily linear, using a locally built structure may suffice.