Monday, April 2, 2012

Creating learning activities

Last month I wrote about the first 2 elements of my learning model. Today I'm going to revisit the third element: Create, which focuses on creating activities that help learners practice their actions, and Provide, which focuses on providing resources to help learners complete the activity.



Envision the following scenario: the objective is to help the learners develop good presentation skills. It's an online class, so they will use your web conferencing platform to deliver a short presentation on a topic of their choice. They can use the the whiteboard app, application sharing or web tour, whichever they like. They have 5 minutes to present.


My preparation: I've shown the learners a number of online presentations, both good and not so good. We've discussed what makes a good presentation and pitfalls to avoid. I've also begun to prepare a rubric that they can use to help them prepare their presentation -  reproduced below. As part of their preparation, each group will add the remaining criteria to this rubric. When all groups have finished this task, we'll get together for a discussion.


When the rubric is finished the learners will use it as an aid to help them polish their presentations. When the presentations are finished, the students and the instructor will use the rubric to score and comment upon the presentations. We'll have a number of sessions like this one, finally reaching the point where each learner creates and delivers a 20 minute presentation online.


Next time, we'll talk about the last 2 elements of my model:




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