For most of my career I have designed courses the way I build Canvas templates, which is out of parts. My atomic design system breaks a course into atoms (colors, fonts, buttons), molecules (a lesson overview, a quiz block), and organisms (full page templates). It works. It makes accessibility something built into the smallest pieces, it keeps a course consistent, and it lets a team build quickly and reuse what they have made. The cost shows up in the learner’s experience. A course built from interchangeable parts can feel like interchangeable parts, with every page competent and nothing carrying a thread from one page to the next.
The book that keeps pushing on that habit is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, one of my favorite science fiction novels. Its protagonist studies organic engineering, a fictional discipline in which buildings are designed through a system the engineer thinks with, as integrated wholes rather than assembled components. I am borrowing a made-up design discipline and applying it to courses, so this is an analogy and should be read as one. It has still been one of the more useful analogies I have.
What does organic engineering ask of a designer?
Zhang’s teacher, Engineer Woo Eubong, starts him on single elements, doors one day and floors the next, before letting him design a whole building. Zhang is frustrated by it until he realizes that doors “set the tone for the building,” since they are the first thing a person touches after seeing it. Later, studying the Wuxi Complex, what impresses him is not only that the details are good “but that they dovetail.” And when he finally designs his beach house, Woo’s advice runs against every planning instinct I have: “Don’t plan the building, let the system do that.”
What does that look like in a course?
The lesson about doors fits modular design more comfortably than I expected. If anything, it says the parts matter more than a modular approach usually treats them. A discussion prompt is the doorway learners use to enter an idea, and a welcome page sets the tone for everything after it. Atomic design is good at making those parts consistent. It is less good at asking whether each one is the right door for this particular course.
The point about dovetailing is harder on modular design. Interchangeable parts are built to fit anywhere, which means they are not built to fit anything in particular. The transition between two modules, the moment where one week’s idea gets picked back up the next, the page that assumes you remember a story from three pages earlier: those are the dovetail joints, and a template library does not make them. Someone has to cut them by hand for the course in front of them.
Woo’s advice is the part I have the hardest time with. “Let the system do that” works in the novel because the system is a kind of extended mind. In course design, the nearest thing I can find is stepping back from the module list and walking through the whole course as a learner would, start to finish, before settling the parts. That is much less mystical than what Zhang experiences, but it is the practice the book points toward, and it is exactly the step my templates make easy to skip.
What gets in the way?
Organic design runs into institutions, and Zhang runs into this too. At New Mexico-Texas the organization pulls him toward standard work. Schools and cooperatives do the same thing through course approval processes that want every outcome specified before anything is built, LMS structures that assume modules and weeks, assessment requirements tied to discrete units, and schedules that cut learning into sessions.
Measurement gets harder as well. In the Wuxi Complex, improving the light in one space can cost ventilation or energy efficiency somewhere else, and a course built as an integrated whole has the same problem. Change one part and something elsewhere shifts, which makes it harder to say which piece is doing the work.
I should also be fair to the modular side. It exists for good reasons. It scales, it is easier to maintain and hand off, and accessibility can be built into its smallest pieces. On a statewide platform with dozens of course authors, an approach that depends on one designer holding the whole course in mind would not survive that designer leaving, and I have written elsewhere about why I care so much about handoffs.
Where does that leave me?
I am not going to abandon modular design, and the book does not ask me to. What it does is keep a question in front of me that my templates tend to answer by default: is this course a set of parts that fit anywhere, or a thing whose parts fit each other? Most of the courses I build are some of both, and I do not have a reliable way to know in advance which parts need the hand-cut joint. That is the part of Zhang’s training I have not finished.
If you have found ways to keep a modular course from reading like a stack of parts, I would like to hear about it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com. For the same tension from a different angle, see Thought Technology, on the arguments built into frameworks like atomic design, and Biomimicry as a Lens.
