Presentation Schedule
Weekly Titles as Micro-Advance Organisers: Small Design Choices for Pedagogical Memory (105333)
Tuesday, 24 March 2026 14:30
Session: Poster Session 2
Room: Orion Hall (5F)
Presentation Type: Poster Presentation
In multi-week university courses, especially those taught annually or intermittently, instructors can face the challenge of erosion of pedagogical memory. A gap of a year can make it surprisingly difficult to recall the original intent behind activities, examples, and conceptual transitions. We discuss how the simple, low-cost intervention of assigning each week concise titles or one-sentence summaries can have an outsized impact, functioning as instructor-facing micro-advance organisers. This insight emerged through reflective analysis and iterative engagement with a low-code class materials system, where the need to manage and update course artefacts made these micro-design elements especially salient.
Whereas ideas such as Lang’s Small Teaching focus on micro-activities inside the classroom, the emphasis here is on micro-design decisions that shape both the structure of a course and the cognitive experience of the teacher. Drawing on Ausubel’s theory of advance organisers, the generation effect, narrative cognition, and the broader metaphor of wayfinding, the paper argues that weekly titles serve as conceptual landmarks that orient instructors within a course’s evolving narrative.
Clear conceptual signposting holds broad relevance across learning contexts, as it requires no technology, budget, or institutional infrastructure, making it easily transferable across resource-diverse settings. The paper offers a model of pedagogical wayfinding and proposes some practical guidelines for educators and LMS designers, suggesting that although sustainable improvement is frequently pursued through large-scale reform, deceptively simple micro-design choices may constitute an under-appreciated alternative pathway.
Authors:
Ian Frank, Future University Hakodate, Japan
About the Presenter(s)
Professor Ian Frank is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at Future University Hakodate in Japan
See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule
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