The Quest for Engaging Learning Activities

Introduction to the Design Process (use diagram)

Shift in recent years to Online Paced Cohort model. content/faculty/learner conceptual outline insert Terry Anderson diagram

Project arose from desire to incorporate evaluation into design process (refer back to diagram); optimize online learning.

Applied for funding from Open Learning Research Fund, successful and acknowledge support of OL.

Optimize learning opportunities
OLFM workload considerations
Most ID takes places in discussion between ID + OLFM/SME
- decisions based on experience and feedback from learners, faculty, other IDs
Courses are complex - hard to pin down what is working for a particular audiance
What can we learn from these experiences in a more systematic fashion (analytical AR project)

Collect and interpret feedback from the learners, OLFMs and other IDs - that leads us to do two things

Refine questions
Evolve our design practices
- Rules of Thumb for effective learning
- Gaining and interpreting feedback
- Developing Flexible activity templates and course sequencing (and supporting documents, reusable rubrics)

First Step Attempt to Catalogue Activities
- scaffolding, culminating (examples)
- interactive - have them look at discussions? design of discussion questions alone -
  - authentic tasks (more meaningful) - going from cooperative to collaborative
    - provide examples of range or ask participants to categorize?
  - highilght the use of rubrics (for F2f, blended)
  - make it an effective use of the learner's time
Conclusions:
- Better to set up flexible templates (they are too complex, evolutionary)
- Rules of cognitive psychology - ways that you can mix/match these is more evolutionary

Formative stage
- what kind of questions should we be asking?
- how to do a mixed-method approach?
- measure of goodness and explanation
- try to identify best and worst practices
Survey
- draft questions; seek input from OLFMs teaching paced course
- surveys sent to 189 students; 52 responses
Data Analysis
- overview of results using Tableau Reader
Departmental Benefits of Process
- dialogue about design and design practices
- sharing documents
- systematically sharing and reflecting on practice within time constraints

Group Discussion: Based on your experience and data so far:
- When a discussion forum works why does it work? When it doesn't, why not? More structure, less structure, better structure?

Build catalogue of activity templates
Examine successful courses for overall structure; perhaps catalogue successful course sequences
Identify specific activities to target in specific courses; build survey links into courses themselves to get immediate feedback when learners complete an activity
Ongoing data collection; incorporate data into process for revising new courses after their initial offering

Do we have basic rules of thumb (heuristics)