Much of the knowledge schools currently spoon-feed explicitly (and boringly) to students can be better taught implicitly within the context of helping students achieve goals they have selected for themselves. Given that we have mechanisms to deliver teaching on a "just-in-time" basis, we can construct courses which call for teaching to occur as the student discovers a "need to know."
Skill-centered, learner-guided courses, which we call Goal-Based Scenarios (GBSs), are quite different than what we see in today's educational system. We believe all courses should be designed in the form of GBSs. A successful GBS negotiates between the desires of students and course designers. For the student, a GBS offers a chance to pursue a clearly stated, interesting goal. For a course designer, however, a GBS is a vehicle to deliver a package of skills the designer wishes students to learn. The challenge for the course designer is to construct a course that will make the student interested in and capable of acquiring the package of skills as a natural consequence of trying to accomplish the courses' motivating goal. As long as the goal is of interest to the student, and the skills needed to accomplish that goal are the skills the course designer wants students to have, we have a match, and thus a workable GBS.
Where am I in the content of the book?
