What is an activity?
What is your definition of an activity in the learning environment? When I think about activities within a face to face sphere, I think team work, collaboration, role plays, discussion and debate. For me it is the formal and informal activities that involve collaboration and team work in a learning environment that I feel best foster my learning, stimulate my thoughts, motivate and develop creativity within.
When I cast my mind to activities in e-learning, I think games, simulations, quizzes and exercises. So the challenge for my mind when thinking of developing e-learning – is ensuring the activity will have the same ability to develop the feeling of motivation and creativity within the learner.
The beauty of activities in an e-learning environment is that for the learner it is a non threatening environment where they honestly have a go, voice an opinion or have their say without the stares, red blotches and shaky voice.
On the other hand for the learner who likes to debate, validate and be heard how do we ensure that this is catered for in an e-learning activity?
My question is what do you think is a good activity for someone who wants to be heard, share and collaborate to learn? Is it a Forum, Chat? Surely there is something a little more fun and creative than this?
Maybe it is more a question of having the perfect blend of activities than their just being the answer to all. Check out this powerpoint from slideshare on different types and best ways to use elearning activities.
Is e-learning activity the journey, or the end?
Should learning activities embedded in an e-learning module be designed as part of the journey? Or is it a tool to end the journey? Learning activities used appropriately, can be used for both purpose.
As part of the journey, you will find successful e-learning modules to include activities such as:
- Simulation
- Typing in comments
- Answering questions
- Taking on a cyber identity in the virtual world to carry out a task
Designed effectively, these learning activities can assist the learner in gaining a hands on feel of carrying out an actual manual task, and collaboratively summarizing and reinforcing the main idea learnt.
Learners need to feel empowered. Having activities as part of the journey allows them to feel “I can do it!”
Courses that embed activities at the end of the module often use the learning activities to track the student’s learning, and hoping the result would give some qualitative or quantitative information that would allow justifying the implementation of such course, by show of return on investment.
Don’t get me wrong, students do get empowerment from completing learning activities at the end of the module too, and that is “I still remember it, yah!”.
This brings us to the big question:
Learning Activity: the star, or a supporting cast?
Should instructional designers create activities so that it is a tool to support the content of the module? Or should contents and designs of the module support the big star that will always appear late? What do you think?
Here are a couple of earlier blogs from logicool on the dilema of dealing with learning activities.
http://www.logicoolsolutions.com/learnDoMasterChallenge/?p=1302 (on how tough it is to come up with activities appropriate for the course)
http://www.logicoolsolutions.com/learnDoMasterChallenge/?p=973 (creating great learning activities)
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