7.1 Activities to encourage active learning - principle 3 - promising

Active learning

To insert active learning opportunities into distance education, instructors should provide opportunities for students to: locate important content, apply the content to a specific situation, analyze the content, synthesis the content, and evaluate the content. We also believe there is great potential for learning when the environment also requires the student to reflect on the process, discuss the process with others, and to summarize the content in various ways.

The challenge for instructors

This means that instructors must re-conceptualize traditional materials for the online environment. In the example above, some way should be used to allow students access to the instructor's comments that do not appear on the slides. If you place presentations without this additional context into courses, you are using resources to deliver what is essentially text with some graphics. You could do this just as easily (and use far less resources) by inserting the text into the course. You must constantly think about how to provide context in a medium that does not use the normal cues of face-to-face teaching.

On a simple level, this means anticipating questions and misunderstanding and addressing them in the materials. It also means creating clear and unambiguous instructions for students and clear expectations for the assignment or activity. It may mean inserting specific activities into the course to encourage a more active approach to learning.