Distributed Learning
“Online or in-person?” is the wrong first question. People learn across settings — at a desk, on a commute, in a hallway conversation, inside communities that have nothing to do with school. Distributed learning is a way of designing that assumes a learner’s attention, relationships, and pathways are spread across formal, informal, and non-formal settings, rather than concentrated in one.
Designing this way tends to produce learning that is both more durable and more humane, because it meets people where they already are. It also reframes the designer’s job: less “build the perfect course,” more “compose the conditions and relationships — human and machine — that make learning possible across the settings of a real life.”
See also: Co-regulation.