What you can do Providing instructions that highlight the purpose of an activity, allow students to prepare for it and its associated learning outcomes can help. Activities that are not explicitly defined for students can cause problems, as they are open to multiple interpretations rather than easily solved by the application of clear instructions. Learners must identify their own unique approaches to a task in order to complete it. Students should be able to focus on an activity rather than spending time trying to work out what is expected of them. Things to consider
- Using a standard template to represent all activities, which outlines clear instructions and expectations for each.
- Recording short videos explaining an activity
- If you sense that students are confused by or struggling with an activity, you may wish to record an additional video to provide clarification.
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What you can do We have sourced some great examples for active learning from others in the sector and collated these here. Many of these provide information on how activities can be adapted to suit the online environment, allowing them to be used both on campus or online. How to do it A few quick ideas to get you started. This site has helpfully grouped the activities by class size and provides a complete module on active learning. Get creative with the examples given and think about how these can be adapted to your class. You may have already implemented active learning into tutorials, however, in the blended environment, it's also important to consider which aspects of lectures can be replaced by an active learning session. |
What you can do A glossary is an alphabetical list of specialised or technical words, terms or abbreviations and their definitions, usually related to a specific discipline or field of knowledge. You might want to consider providing a glossary for the key terms in your course, or alternatively to encourage more active learning you can ask students to generate a glossary. They could work collaboratively either as a whole class or in smaller sub groups. The glossary should be more than a simply dictionary of meaning, you can ask student to include links to or references to key information sources regarding this term, or cross reference to the lecture material etc. This can also be a really good way to get student to start to write things into their own words rather than simply copy and pasting text which they don't fully understand. Building class or subject glossary can be an excellent group activity and can be used to encourage students to discuss their understanding of terms. You could extend this to something more detailed than a glossary and ask student create fact sheet or study notes on a specific topic. Students could work in small groups to generate the content using a standardised template, if you have more than 1 group working on each topic you can then get the matched groups to compare and discuss what they produce to come up with an agreed final version which can then be shared with the wider class. This can be a simple way into having student provide peer review of each others work. If your topic or discipline is one which is often misunderstood you could ask student build a glossary of errors. So they can identify where the terms have been used incorrectly or have bene misquoted. This can be a fun exercise which requires high levels of application of knowledge You could also turn this into a formative or summative assessment either as a straightforward glossary submission or you could incorporate questions into your assessment that require student to explain something using specified terms. Things to consider Ensure that what ever format that the class produce their glossary in is accessible to all. This can be achieved through using a template document which has been set up to meet accessibility requirements . You can provide information to student about aspects of the formatting that are set to support this, and therefore allow discussion around communication and interaction with others with different needs. If the students are expected to build their own discipline/course/topic specific glossary, it is important that you either provide them with a list or source for the relevant words, and a source or location to find the definitions, or you provide them with guidance and training on determining the quality of what they find ( this can be the start of engaging student with critical thinking) Alternatively, check their glossaries periodically to ensure that they are defining the words appropriately. Many technical and scientific words have different meanings depending on the discipline and not all sources (especially online) are reliable. It is also a good idea to ask your students to include examples of uses of the words in their glossary. How to do it There are many way that student can work collaboratively on a shared document these include
- Wiki
- Google docs
- Office 365
Pedagogical evidence base E. Khoo et al (2012) I Learnt a Whole Lot More than Churning out an Essay: Using Online Tools to Support Critical Collaborative Inquiry in a Blended Learning Environment. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 16; 127-140. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1079812 |
