Content! Content! Content!… It is all about the Content stupid!

This is the mantra that is played out in thousands of curriculum planning and departmental developmental meetings in HE all across the world. For historical reasons, content is all there is.

So where is this taking us? I had a trawl through the knowledge doubling estimates that are out there, using the year 1CE as a starting place, and the doubling goes something like this:

Doubling	Start Date	Finish Date
1	1Ce	1500
2	1500	1750
3	1750	1900
4	1900	1950
5	1950	1960
6	1960	1965

After 1965, the estimates kind of mush together ranging from estimates of every five years (indicating another nine doublings), to an increase that has us doubling every 11 months in 2010. If the increase to doubling every 11 months is linear (which it is not), we get a slope of -1.08 that gives us a further 19 doublings since 1965 as the table below shows (in approximations):

Doubling	Start Date	Finish Date
7	1965	1968
8	1968	1972
9	1972	1976
10	1976	1979
11	1979	1983
12	1983	1986
13	1986	1989
14	1989	1992
15	1992	1994
16	1994	1996
17	1996	1998
18	1998	2000
19	2000	2002
20	2002	2003
21	2003	2005
22	2005	2007
23	2007	2008
24	2008	2010
25	2010	2011

That’s a lot of knowledge. The content for a five minute lecture segment from 1965 expanded to become a 90 minute lecture by 1979, and could fill an entire 15 week course by 1990. To fully explore the 1965 five minutes of content today would fill a lecture lasting five years – non stop.

Not all areas of knowledge have expanded at this rate, but even so, some areas might have.

Given that this information is now (more or less) freely available, why do we insist on trying to cover it in our teaching? How can we hope to find published textbooks that can give us an up to date picture of a field of study?

And yet, content is the heart of everything we do. I was going over some reflective practise for a HE teaching qualification recently, and shook my head as the lecturer lamented the fact that he was having difficulty finding a textbook that he could teach from because the textbooks are all out of date. He also wondered about how he could teach when he knew that in his particular field, the content he was teaching would be out of date before the students graduate. Another colleague was voicing her frustration about questions being asked in a lecture because it meant that she couldn’t get through her planned content. In the same conversation someone else lamented that she was expected to write a single piece of assessment that would cover the content of her entire module – an impossible task given how much content she was teaching.

If we are to keep up with the explosion of information, we need to both double the text on our powerpoint slides (which regularly happens), and speak twice as fast. This will take care of this years information growth. Questions are out, and curriculum planning means we need to offer double the modules in the next academic year, which will take care of next years information growth. After that, we will have to see. I guess I better organise some meetings so we can get this going and not fall behind our sister institutions.