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Use of a Metaphor

A metaphor is a strong story line or theme in a course. In a course with a metaphor, the story or theme is continued throughout the entire course, and all the content material is related to the story. The story helps to draw the material together as well as increase a students’ interest in the content. However, not all course content lends itself to the metaphor idea. Consequently, the team working on the course considered several issues:

• Is there a metaphor that would enhance the learning in this course?
• Is the age of the target audience one that might be interested in a story line?
• Would the target audience be able to comprehend the content delivered through a story line?
• Do the designers and author/s want to use a metaphor for this course?

A metaphor was not considered for the first CLASS™ course, Global Perspectives: Bosnia because of its serious tone. It was an upper-level research-type course, which was designed to help the student tie together all their previous years of instruction in history, geography and current events. It was presented through the eyes of some Bosnian refugees via video.

Several chemistry and math course and a study skills course were developed using strong metaphors.

Chem City became the name of the environmental chemistry course. The story line is a city and its pollution catastrophes. The metaphor in this course, with its humor and relevance, worked nicely.

The study skills course, which turned into Learning FUNdamentals, had a sports-dominated theme. The analogy of sports was carried to an extreme. It has often been used as an example of a course that sometimes loses its content in the strong metaphor. Students sometimes miss the content message as they try to “sort out” the real “meat” of the course.

Another course that was chosen for a metaphor treatment was a first semester chemistry course. This course followed a spaceship from an overcrowded planet looking for a new home—one in which the problems of Earth could be avoided. The Voyage of the Democritus was successfully accomplished overall, but not without some difficulties trying to “tie” all the major chemistry concepts to the story. Sometimes it was a stretch to fit the content into the story line! When that happens, the story line gets lost or becomes so difficult to accept that it loses credibility. Then you begin to wonder why you started using it in the first place!

Still another type of metaphor was grounded in real-life experiences. Such a course was the basic math course, Interactive General Math 1. In this course, students learn basic math concepts in a real-life setting. The following introduction is from the Course Guide.

Welcome to Interactive General Math I! You are going to be working with five other students to plan a trip to a music concert called Music Mania. You will travel with each of the students through the different units in the course. As you complete the units, you will be learning about math and how it relates to experiences you might encounter in your everyday life.

The design team in the American government course, Inside Washington, found that it was difficult to write a metaphor for a course that was non-linear since it was impossible to know where the students would go next! They succeeded, however, using the theme of a busload of students off to visit the capital in Washington, D.C. This type of metaphor creates more of a theme for the course to follow than an actual story line for all components of the course. It is more manageable, easier to accomplish, and provides a real-life background against which to lay the course content.

A major issue in the “to do” or “not to do” a metaphor question is the time involved in either finding a writer who can carry a story line throughout a course or using a metaphor writer coupled with a content expert to produce the content. Some content providers are eager to write a story to teach the content. Other authors are unwilling, or unable, to create a relevant and helpful story line. Either way, the time, effort, and skill involved in carrying an effective story line throughout a course are significant. The time and trouble must be weighed against the advantage to the student for the type of content presented.

One big negative effect of the metaphor turned out to be the confusion it caused some students—especially in the case of the strong metaphor in Learning FUNdamentals. Some students had trouble figuring out what content was important for an exam!

It was deduced that the students used in our research studies tended to like the metaphor approach better if it pertained to something they could actually relate to in their lives. All the students who commented required that it not get in the way of an easy understanding of what they need to learn in order to be successful in the course. As it turns out, having fun is not as important for a student as accomplishing the task at hand—receiving credit and getting a good grade in the course. There needs to be more research done in this area.

The trend for future courses is to created in modules—“chunks” of content that can be put in a database and can be used as discrete learning sessions. In this type of environment, it is difficult to imagine how a metaphor could function.

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