What Distributed Learning Actually Means
“Online or in-person?” is the wrong first question. It treats the delivery channel as the defining feature of a learning experience, when the more honest truth is that people learn across settings — at a desk, on a commute, in a hallway conversation, inside a community that has nothing to do with school. Distributed learning is not a synonym for online learning; it’s a way of designing that assumes a learner’s attention, relationships, and pathways are spread across formal, informal, and non-formal settings. This post unpacks what that shift asks of us as designers, and why it tends to produce learning that’s both more durable and more humane.