Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

10.10. Designing Student Activities

This is the most critical part of the design process, especially for fully online students, who have neither the regular classroom structure or campus environment for contact with the instructor and other students nor the opportunity for spontaneous questions and discussions in a face-to-face class. Regular student activities though are critical for keeping all students engaged and on task, irrespective of mode of delivery. These can include:

• Assigned readings, with some activity that enables students to demonstrate their understanding
• Simple multiple choice self-assessment tests of understanding with automated feedback, using the computer-based testing facility within a learning management system
• Questions requiring short paragraph answers which may be shared with other students for comparison or discussion
• Formally marked and assessed monthly assignments in the form of short essays or reports;
• Individual or group project work spaced over several weeks
• An individual student blog or e-portfolio that enables the student to reflect on their recent learning, and which may be shared with the instructor or other students
• Online discussion forums, which the instructor will need to organize and monitor

There are many other activities that instructors can devise to keep students engaged. However, all such activities need to be clearly linked to the stated learning outcomes for the course and can be seen by students as helping them prepare for any formal assessment. If learning outcomes are focused on skills development, then the activities should be designed to give students opportunities to develop or practice such skills.

These activities also need to be regularly spaced and an estimate made of the time students will need to complete the activities. In step eight, we shall see that student engagement in such activities will need to be monitored by the instructor.

It is at this point where some hard decisions may need to be made about the balance between ‘content’ and ‘activities’. Students must have enough time to do regular activities (other than just reading) once each week at least, or their risk of dropping out or failing the course will increase dramatically. In particular they will need some way of getting feedback or comments on their activities, either from the instructor or from other students, so the design of the course will have to take account of the instructors’ workload as well as the students’.

In my view, most university and college courses are overstuffed with content and not enough consideration is given to what students need to do to absorb, apply and evaluate such content. I have a very rough rule of thumb that students should spend no more than half their time reading content and attending lectures, the rest being spent on interpreting, analyzing, or applying that content through the kinds of activities listed above. As students become more mature and more self-managed the proportion of time spent on activities can increase, with the students themselves being responsible for identifying appropriate content that will enable them to meet the goals and criteria laid down by the instructor. However, that is my personal view. Whatever your teaching philosophy though, there must be plenty of activities with some form of feedback for online students, or they will drop like flies on a cold winter’s day.