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| Image: WikiMedia Commons |
Oftentimes, teachers who develop courses online,
find it difficult to gauge WHAT and HOW MANY activities
they should include in their courses.
Many college-level teachers have no formal training in education or background in teaching. For instance, many adjunct teachers come from professional careers after many years and then start teaching online. It is assumed that they would automatically know how to design a course, develop course activities and deliver them in an engaging way to students. So, many teachers are left to figure out how to do this all on their own.
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| Image: Pixabay |
Teacher as course designer
When designing a course, developing online course activities that are interesting and intellectually stimulating to students is quite a challenge. Having consulted on many projects as an online course developer and instructional designer, I've had the opportunity to gain some valuable knowledge about how successful courses are envisioned and developed. For now, let's focus on developing sound course activities.
When setting up a course, it is important to strike a balance between real activities and fluff. So, the first question to answer is "HOW MANY activities is enough?" This question is even harder to answer for online courses because unlike face-to-face courses, it isn't easy to gauge feedback on how much work students are able to take on.
Some tools and techniques from the world of instructional design that I believe help teachers in developing the right number of course activities are -
Tool #1: Time-on-Task
In the course development world, "time-on-task" is a list of how long it takes students to complete a variety of tasks in a given course. For instance, reading a chapter usually takes students 3-4 minutes per page. These numbers have been researched and shown to be best practices. Most schools have a number of hours that students in their courses need to complete per semester. So, when developing a weekly list of online course activities and assignments, you should create a task list which includes the time-on-task numbers for each activity. You should assign the weekly hour limit and make sure that your course activities fall below the weekly number of hours.
Tool #2: Blooms Taxonomy
When developing course activities for higher education, most course designers will use Bloom's Taxonomy. This tool can also be used by teachers to figure WHAT course activities to create in order to keep students engaged. Bloom's Taxonomy is a system that was created by Benjamin Bloom in 1965. It classifies learning objectives based on the level of cognition required. Bloom’s Taxonomy consists of six levels of cognition that can be identified and matched to the learning activities and assignments in a given course.
- At the Knowledge level, students engage in activities that involve recalling facts and figures.
- At the Comprehension level, students are asked to explain the meaning of concepts and identify key characteristics of a topic in their own words.
- The Application level asks students to solve problems, delineate the process of solving a problem and to identify what concepts would be needed to solve a problem.
- At the Analysis level, students need to show they can understand relationships between concepts and the abilities to show the similarities (or differences) between concepts.
- The Synthesis level asks students to create something new based on what they already know.
- At the Evaluation level, students must make a judgment about information and qualify its meaning.
When developing weekly course activities, I use two rules of thumb related to Bloom's Taxonomy. One is cognitive mixing and the other is progressive Bloom levels. Cognitive mixing involves using more than one Bloom level within the same activity. While one part of your activity may require students to regurgitate the facts about a topic, the same activity can add a higher Bloom level by asking students to analyze what they have learned. The other rule of thumb which I use involves moving from a lower level Bloom to a higher level Bloom within the same activity. This "progressive Bloom level" strategy promotes deeper learning about the subject because students have to engage a topic at a very elementary level and then get to develop a deeper perspective about a topic within the same activity.
For instance, "Part One" of an activity would introduce students to the basics of a topic and then "Part Two" of the activity may ask students to consider how they would solve a relevant problem using the topic combined with something they already know. I would create a discussion forum so that students in the class could share their perspectives on solutions based on their newly acquired knowledge and backgrounds.
Tool #3: Connection and Background
I didn't realize how important this third tool was until I started working in online course design. When teaching face-to-face, you usually introduce a topic by framing it within the context of the overall subject matter for the course. This becomes even more important in online courses given the fact that students are pacing themselves and are often learning in a disjointed way.
When deciding whether or not to use an activity in your course, consider how it connects to the overall course learning objectives you've established. Telling students how the new topic aligns with the learning objectives explains why they are doing this particular course activity. In addition, giving students background about the activity gives a hint of what to expect from the activity. For example, in my Intro to Computers course, I give my students a digital lifestyle survey to complete after reading a chapter on living in the digital age. Here's an example of my description for this survey.
The description gives students enough information to determine what the assignment is about and what knowledge they will gain by completing it. Also, notice how the first and last sentences tell students how long the survey is and that they will have to complete a short essay. This helps students with time management so that they can plan when to complete this assignment.
