No matter what you’re trying to achieve, knowing your goal is essential to reaching it. This simple truth lies at the heart of backward design, a powerful approach for building course modules that set students up for success. But in an online course, modules don’t stand alone—they’re part of a bigger picture that students experience as a complete class.
Designing your modules is a chance to show students how everything fits together. By weaving themes, context, or even a story into the course structure, you can create a more engaging, connected, and meaningful learning experience. Let’s explore how using narrative in your course design can boost student engagement and increase context throughout the course.
Why Narrative?
Modules in an online course are a lot like chapters in a book. They organize the subject matter logically and help students follow along. But they also provide a higher-level framework that students can use to grasp the course’s big picture. To maximize this potential, it helps to understand how the brain processes information.
According to John Hattie and Greg Yates (2014), students instinctively build mental models, or schema, to structure knowledge and make sense of seemingly disparate parts in the context of what they know. However, learning doesn’t always happen in a straight line. Joanna Szurmak and Mindy Thuna (2013) suggest that the brain learns more like a fractal—by making multiple connections across layers of information. This is where stories can make a big difference. They help students layer ideas, trigger responses, and create mental connections that make learning stick. “Using stories,” they claim, “may layer and activate patterns and set up an affectively charged structure to which students will instinctively respond and with which they will interact” (p. 549).
In other words, students naturally think about the world in terms of narrative—characters, plots, settings, and themes are already part of their everyday lives. By crafting a narrative structure for your course, you can help students embed the details of your subject matter into a bigger picture that resonates with them.
Types of Narrative Structure
An online course doesn’t have to be as complex as a novel or a movie to include narrative elements. Even a well-organized sequence of modules can create a meaningful “story” that guides students through the learning process. Here are some examples of narrative structures you can use to organize your course:
| Pattern | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Chronological | By date of discovery, invention, or maturation | An American history course begins in the present, establishing students as time travelers on a reverse chronological journey. |
| Sequential | By order of steps or order of importance | A political science course introduces topics as they arise in the unfolding an election campaign or in an immigrant’s application for citizenship. |
| Funneling | From the foundational to the complex or from an overview into its constituencies | An educational leadership course guides students in creating an alternative school system from the ground up. |
| Geographical /Spatial | By location or proximity | A business course apprentices students to a corporate vision or visionary from founding to failure or success. |
| Ideological | By systems, genres, or schools of thought | A science course organizes topics by the lives of renowned researchers of discovery’s frontiers. |
| Problems and Solutions | By questions or avenues of inquiry | A mathematics course opens each module with a dilemma that the course’s mathematical formulae solve. |
Any of these course structures offer the potential for embedding a discipline’s details into a narrative context. Not only can they incite the imagination and ignite affective areas of the brain, but also, as Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa (2010) explains it, it’s simply how the brain learns best.
Bringing Narrative to Life in Your Modules
Once you’ve chosen a narrative structure, you can further enhance your course by incorporating elements of storytelling into your teaching approach. Consider building a setting of curiosity, developing a plot of discovery, and encouraging students to be the main actors in their own learning journey. These strategies not only help with student engagement but also make learning more enjoyable and encourage students think critically as they move through the course.
For instance, in a science course, you could present key concepts as part of a quest for knowledge, where students “discover” breakthroughs as they move through each module. Or, in a history course, you might create a chronological journey that invites students to step into the shoes of historical figures, experiencing events from their perspectives.
Conclusion
A modular structure contains a framework for arranging your course content logically and consistently. These structures not only diminish the chance that students will get lost in the course, but also provide a ready-made schema for big-picture understanding. When narrative is layered into a course structure, learning becomes embedded in a more natural context that engages students affectively as well as cognitively. This type of engagement helps them retain details and make meaning of information and also increases the impact of and learning potential in your course.
References
Clark, M. C. (2010). Narrative learning: Its contours and its possibilities. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2010(126), 3–11.
Hattie, J., & Yates, G. (2014). Visible learning and the science of how we learn. New York: Routledge.
Szurmak, J., & Thuna, M. (2013). Tell me a story: The use of narrative as a tool for instruction. Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, April 10–13, 2013, Indianapolis, IN. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/acrl/conferences/2013/papers
Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2010). The new science of teaching and learning: Using the best of mind, brain, and education science in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
