How can faculty design their online courses?
Page 4: Learning Activities
Information on this page was adapted from:
- Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes, Riggs, S.A., & Linder, K.E.
- Learning Activities and Active Learning Online and Types of Interactions from Indiana University/University of California Davis.
Now that you’ve developed course goals, learning objectives, and assessments for your online course, it’s time to curate or design learning activities and resources that will allow your students to practice what they are expected to learn. As we discussed on a previous page, in backward design every learning activity has a purpose that aligns with your course goals and learning objectives. Effective learning activities (sometimes referred to as active learning activities) seek to:
- Actively engage students — Students must interact with the content or concepts in a meaningful way.
- Foster learning through metacognition and reflection — Students reflect on what they learn individually, in pairs, or in groups.
Digging Deeper: COI and Student Engagement
- Being “Present” in Your Online Course Indiana University/UC Davis
- Types of Interaction Indiana University/UC Davis
- Community of Inquiry (video 4:00 min.) Jered Borup, George Mason University
Although you probably include active and reflective learning activities in your face-to-face courses (e.g., group discussions, think-pair-share), you might be uncertain how these elements will play out in an online course, especially one that contains asynchronous components. As you begin thinking about this shift, it may be helpful to become familiar with the Community of Inquiry (COI) Framework (see the box on the right), which consists of three overlapping components vital to online learning: cognitive, teacher, and social presence. Each of these components involves interactions: The students interact with the content, with you, and with other students in the course, all of which serve to promote active engagement. When you plan these types of interactions, consider ways to incorporate opportunities for student metacognition and reflection.
Following are a few actions you can take to do this.
Digging Deeper: Tools to Facilitate Engagement
- Teaching with Blogs Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching
- Flipgrid: Empowering Voices with Asynchronous Online Video Discussions Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching
- “@ Them and See What Happens”: Using Twitter in the Classroom Duquesne University, Center for Teaching Excellence
- Use the tools available in your LMS and supplement, as needed, with external tools that facilitate engagement (e.g., brainstorming tool)
- Use video conferencing tools (e.g., Zoom) to:
- Host guest lecturers or panels of experts
- Create break-out rooms for small- group discussions
- Limit your selection of tools to one or two per course. It’s easy to go overboard. Try to choose tools that require only a minimal learning curve so that students can begin using them right away and without much effort.
Tip
Schedule more synchronous sessions at the beginning of the course to help build a sense of community.
Digging Deeper: Discussion Boards
- Discussion Boards: Valuable? Overused? Discuss. Inside Higher Ed
- Five New Twists for Online Discussions University of Wisconsin Extended Campus
- 10 Tips for Effective Online Discussions Educause
- Practical Tips for Teaching Online Small-Group Discussions Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
- Ask open-ended questions that encourage self-reflection and discussion, as opposed to questions that have a correct answer
- Allow students to incorporate not only text but also links to media and other files they have created
- Use the tool to encourage participation and interaction among students rather than simply as an assignment to be graded
Developing or Modifying Learning Activities for Online Environments
Whether you’re developing a new online or hybrid course or converting an existing face-to-face course, you will need to think about the activities you’re going to use to offer students opportunities to practice what they are learning. As you do so, consider the following:
- Is the activity authentic and meaningful?
- In other words,
- Does the activity enable students to solidify their knowledge?
- Does the activity allow the student to practice real-world applications?
- Does the activity promote interactions?
- The activity should encourage:
- Student-faculty interaction
- Student-student interaction
- Student-content interaction
- Does the activity include opportunities for feedback?
- Feedback can be provided in a number of ways, such as:
- Instructor feedback
- Peer review
- Instant feedback (e.g., automated feedback from an online quiz)
- Does the activity foster metacognition and reflection?
- Whether your students are journaling, writing a paper, or holding a discussion with a peer, the activity should aim to help the student:
- Make connections between concepts
- Clarify alternative views and perceptions
- Improve metacogntion
Questions adapted from the Indiana University/University of California, Davis, course module series.
One of the ways that Adriane Seiffert modified her learning activities was to record each lecture as a series of short videos for students to watch. She discusses how well this transferred from a face-to-face format to an online format (time: 1:30).
Adriane E. Seiffert, PhD
Senior Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor of Psychology
Vanderbilt University
Adriane Seiffert, PhD
So lecturing transferred “okay.” It did take a little while to get used to it. It felt like my first year of lecturing at the beginning, the same way I felt the first time standing in front of a group of 50, 100 students. But after getting into the rhythm of doing it, you do kind of get that mental space of having practiced it, being aware of how it’s gonna go, of how time passes. And so it gets to be just like lecturing that you would do in a regular classroom, maybe shorter bits, but still, you’re talking about a topic, you’re telling a story, you’re using your slides and walking through the material in the same sort of way.
One of the difficulties was judging the student response. I was very used to looking at student faces after I present or while I’m presenting something to judge things like How long should we talk about this? Or Is this an interesting question? Or Have you heard this in another class and so this is something we don’t need to talk about again? And just from facial expressions or just a very quick sort of question and answer, I would be able to gauge how long to spend on some material versus others. And I’m really missing that with this online course. Lecturing in smaller bits helps and having Zoom discussions can help so I leave some of the material to talk about in discussion with the students so that I can gauge it then.
For Your Information
Many faculty are likely to find themselves teaching in some hybrid fashion this fall, perhaps with some (socially distanced) students in the classroom and others participating remotely via Zoom or another videoconference tool. This article, Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms, has some ideas about active learning activities for hybrid classes.
Common Learning Activity Tools for Online Environments
Learning activities can be facilitated through a variety of tools—some that are built into your LMS and others that are external. When you think about which tools to use, you’ll want to keep in mind the following considerations.
- The tool(s) must support the purpose of the activity (i.e., what you want your students to gain).
- Active learning opportunities can often be achieved through the use of simple tools.
- The more tools you use, the more support you will need to provide—students may have a learning curve or need your assistance to use each new tool.
In the interviews below, Joe Bandy discusses how to balance these considerations by prioritizing the types of tools you need and aligning them with your course goals.
Joe Bandy, PhD
Assistant Director, Center for Teaching
Vanderbilt University
Joe Bandy, PhD
Prioritizing types of tools
As far as what tools to use, I certainly would think about several types. One is video conferencing tools like Zoom or Teams or Google Meet that enable you and your students to have a synchronous platform to interact with meetings. There is no substitute for face-to-face learning, but the closest we have are these video conferencing tools that do go a long way to providing a sense of immediate interaction and collaborative learning, planning, problem solving, debating, creative projects, you name it. Those can have the instructor present for classroom-type meetings, or they can be small group sessions that are organized by students themselves to allow for more collaborative projects, which are also helpful in promoting a learning community in a course.
The second set of tools I would consider might be digital social reading tools, tools like Perusall or Hypothesis. There are platforms in which instructors can submit a reading, usually in the form of PDF, and students can read through it and highlight sections and make comments in the margins. That way they can see each other’s comments. They can read together and learn from one another’s take on the readings. That social annotation is amazingly helpful, especially in reading-intensive courses.
I also would suggest that there be some kind of consideration of note-taking tools. You can use a simple Google Doc or Sheet or something like Padlet, which has a bit more graphic interfaces that students can use to post comments and thoughts about different readings or common questions. It can help students learn to take notes better. But it can also allow students to have more synchronous or asynchronous modes of collaboration that are well suited to hybrid classrooms. Those can be taken in the moment and during a synchronous meeting, or they can happen asynchronously over time. And they can also provide an accessible record of learning for students who might have say, access issues with videoconferencing. So note-taking tools like that can be amazingly helpful for student skill development and continuing a sense of learning community, even in asynchronous ways.
Joe Bandy, PhD
Aligning with course goals and limiting the number of tools
Having clarity with goals is really critical here. Say you’re teaching a course in psychology, and you really want students to read and write extensively about psychological theory and principles of research, then you’re probably going to want to focus on maybe digital social reading tools or discussion boards within your LMS where students can respond to the readings collaboratively. And those might be the only tools you really care to use.
I think it is important generally to only assign a number of tools that are either going to be easy to learn or, if they’re hard to learn, they’re going to be ones that you use regularly, so that pushing students up that learning curve is going to be worth it in the end. For instance, I can imagine using, say, video editing tools, which are not easy to learn necessarily, in a course that’s focused on art and film production. But otherwise, you probably wouldn’t want to do that if it’s a one-off assignment. So use tools selectively and you only use ones that students already have access to and can use relatively easily.
You might really want to limit it to two or three that are helpful to you. I will say that that not only helps your students, but it helps you. It might take a while to learn the tool in the first place. And there’s all kinds of costs by using a ton of different tools with students, since they might need to have technical support and they come to you to learn how to use it. So the fewer tools you’re using, the less work you’ll have to do with students to help them participate more fully in the class.
Tools for Learning Activities
The Blended & Online Learning Design (BOLD) Fellows Program—a partnership between the Center for Teaching and Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning at Vanderbilt University—provides an analysis of online tools that can be used for online learning activities and assessments. To view this information, visit the BOLD Fellows Tools page. Next, click on the “Tools” drop-down menu and select the type of learning activity (e.g., collaborative writing, online discussions) that you are interested in. From there you will find general information about the method, potential uses, pros and cons, as well as a variety of tools that can be used to implement it in your course.
Example Course Development Plan: Learning Activities
We’ve covered a lot of information about learning activities. Now let’s take a look at some examples.
Activity
It’s your turn.
- Apply what you have learned on this page and select one or two learning activities for your own course. Remember that each learning activity should align with one of your course goals. (Note: You might find it easier to do this activity and the activity on Page 5 at the same time.) Again, continue using the template that you downloaded from Page 2 and on which you entered your course goals, learning objectives, and assessments.
- Make sure your learning activity choices consider the following factors:
- Is the activity authentic and meaningful?
- Does the activity promote interactions?
- Does the activity include opportunities for feedback?
- Does the activity foster metacognition and reflection?