EPISODE 41: (RE)DESIGNING ONLINE EDUCATION WITH MICHAEL YOUNG
Episode 41: (Re)Designing Online Education with Michael Young | 1 September 2026
Stephen and Trent welcome back their favorite academic Yoda, Dr. Michael F. Young, to share a vision for high-quality online course, assessment, and worldbuilding design. The trio draws on Michael’s decades of research, scholarship, and administration experience to discuss discovery-driven anchored instruction for the digital age, including:
The limits of face-to-face instructional material in online educational environments;
Managing the overhead and complexity of contextually rich, inquiry-based projects;
Balancing the adoption of new tools, treatments, and processes with pre-adoption theories of practice;
Risks of standardization and “one-size-fits-all” pedagogy;
Mistaken conclusions drawn from pandemic-induced remote learning;
Treating the mind as a uniform information-processing machine versus a continually emerging, uniquely situated system;
Leveraging narrative structures to establish shared contexts (generator sets) for learners to plan, perform, and reflect;
Exploring richly authentic, real-world problems to prime learners for lecture or other didactic instruction (i.e., creating a time for telling);
Developing interactive historical, literary, and scientific agents that personalize student inquiry;
Implementing ungrading and critical self-reflection to help learners integrate their academic work with lived experiences and goals;
How practical stories and play help learners grapple with complex, abstract concepts like logarithms and probability;
Strategically distributing learners in groups to foster peer-to-peer mentoring and collaboration;
Using digital environments and tools to evaluate process over product;
Designing trust-based student cohorts that upend the isolation and efficiency-driven silos of self-paced, asynchronous online courses;
Teaching for transfer by providing multiple cases, stories, and scenarios through which learners compare, contrast, and reflect on invariant structures; and
Applying the STAR Legacy Challenge Cycle to design iterative, spiral curricula that teach interdisciplinary knowledge and skills.
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