Mathematics

In this way of thinking about educational design, we find the curricular spider’s
web of Van den Akker (see e.g., Thijs and Van den Akker 2009) very useful. It
is depicted in Figure 5. In the spider’s web there are the aspects that need to
be addressed when designing education. This leeds to questions as ‘Where
does learning take place?’, ‘With whom?’, ‘How does the teacher support the
learning process?’, etc. The metaphor of a spider’s web is used to emphasize
that a choice in one of these aspects (e.g., the location) influences choices in
others (e.g., learning activities).
Figure 5: Curricular spider’s web. (Reproduced with permission from Thijs and
Van den Akker 2009)
The fact that there is not one canonical answer to the questions addressed in
the curricular spider’s web, is again explained by the TPACK framework
mentioned in section 2. An important aspect of this framework is the context –
the big circle surrounding Figure1. The answer to questions like ‘where’ or
‘how’ depends not only on the course’s content and aims, but also on the
context: what needs do students have? where do they live? in what way can
they combine their study with work and social life? Etc.
This way of thinking leads to a new course design. In this design, we have
kept the weekly cycle and the key event of our first model. This cycle is a
strong and helpful guideline both for the designers and for the students. But no
longer is the key event necessarily something that happens in the classroom –
we differentiate, prescribing different activities for different learning settings.
Students can still choose to come to the classroom, but they can also decide
to meet each other in the neighbourhood of their homes for a peer group
meeting, or they can have a peer group meeting ‘at a distance’, using modern
communication technology. In the latter cases, the teacher supports the
process more from a distance.
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