Sunday 3 April 2011

Best Practices in Activity-based Learning II

Keep a good balance of complexity for the learning activities – not too complex and not too simple!

We are always under pressure to deliver quality education and in so doing very often we tend to associate quality with quantity and complexity. There is a perception among many educators and other stakeholders such as the students, parents and even policy makers that the more difficult the work is, means the quality or level of education is high. In activity-based learning it is important to keep the balance between complexity and difficulty level to maintain students’ motivation, confidence and drive to complete the activity. The learning activity designer needs to bear in mind that for a majority of the time the learner will be on his/her own in the learning environment. Therefore cognitive or psychomotor activity overload will have a negative impact of the learner’s affective levels. With respect to emotions and their effects on e-learning, a number of researchers have highlighted the decisive role that they play in human action and the forming of priorities by the individuals engaged in a particular process.

Provide a reasonable time span for the completion of learning activities
 Time keeping, estimation and management are important elements in e-learning. While courses are traditionally related to the number of contact hours in a semester between a lecturer and his students, the same formula cannot be applied when it comes to e-learning, more specifically online computer-based learning activities. It is important that a tutor or lecturer has a quite accurate estimation of the time to be allocated for a particular learning activity and/or sub-parts of a learning activity. Experience and previous feedback of students can play a very important role to guide the lecturer to set or review the time allocated to students for the work. The lecturer needs also anticipate possible issues and problems that students may face, evaluate how this will impact on the work of the student and to have a list of those issues listed and their workarounds. A FAQ style might prove handy.

Use clear and simple language in describing the activity steps 

When we write content and instructions it is important to bear in mind that we are writing for others to read and understand. Each and every learner is a different and unique individual and they perceive and process information differently. What can be seen to be a trivial instruction to the learner might actually be very confusing and therefore affect the learning experience. Technical jargons related to the course and/or to the learning environment should be avoided at this stage unless the terms have already been introduced in earlier activities to the learners.
 
Provide learners with examples of what is expected from them 

Learners continuously need assurances and reassurances that they are on the right track. This is a phenomenon which is observed because learners in reality do fear the autonomy they are given in the learning process. A good way in online environments and in activity-based learning is to provide them with worked-out examples, or sample of previous work of students. The only issue in this is that some students will just try to reproduce the same type of work leading to lack of application of their own creative skills.

7 comments:

  1. The above fact presented in the article is a systematic way of planning how to manage a class and about how to facilitate a task for a student. Truly speaking a teacher or even any other people should indeed posses these qualities and these ways of performing tasks.

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  2. According to what I have read and what I have been experiencing in this online module, I can say that our lecturers are capable of making these decisive roles that have been highlighted by the researchers. To exemplify my point of view, the actual activity, which was given to us, has a time span of 2 weeks as compared to the previous tasks. In my opinion, the factors taken into consideration might have been based on the time taken for the understanding of the task, the pace of working of students (this may have been assumed by the lecturers according to the submission date in contrast to the deadline date of our previous activities) and the anticipation of possible issues and problems that students may face. Next, the lecturer has given a simple and clear explanation of the activity steps using simple words. Understanding of the task has been proven by only two or three questions in the Q&A forum. There are also examples which are provided to the learners of sample of work of previous students doing this module. Hence, by following these rules, we will be able to keep the balance between complexity and difficulty level while maintaining students’ motivation, confidence and drive to complete theses online activities.

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  3. I perfectly agree with you my friend, on the fact that we have given time according to the complexity of the task that we given. For instance for the multiple choice questions the time allocated to submit was shorter as compared to more difficult questions- for instance the self assessment questions. Concerning the notes, we were provided with a nice package of notes that encompass the whole topic and was very helpful. Moreover at first we were given simpler task and as we are getting used to this way of learning the complexity of the task is evolving.

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  4. Yeah indeed, I agree with you guys. In this way students will understand what they are learning more properly, hence giving better performance.

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  5. I agree with you guys. In such education system where students can understand and assimilates what they are learning, they will indeed perform better.

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  6. "Learners continuously need assurances and reassurances that they are on the right track". I'm not proud to say that i am among those students. However, By reading the above article. It clearly made some sense in my mind that E-learning can definitely be monitored by logical observations. Indeed, if many students take their GEM for granted, What would be the utility of making it available? I Think that students should use all the resources available to them and boost up their studies with tips given in the module of Educational technologies. I often 'Skype' my tutor to clear all my doubts. I recommend others to do so.

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  7. As I can see, All of my peers that commented above are right. However, Let's observe a case I was thinking about:

    In conventional studies, where a student is unable to submit a work due to an unexpected event, a student can submit a letter of excuse along with proof. E- Learning has no known solution to this problem according to me.

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