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Building e-tivities- key principles 1. Decide in advance of the students logging on what you expect them to do and what the e-moderators will do. 2. Ensure the students are clear about your intended objectives for an e-tivity. Start with the end in mind. 3. Ensure that your planned evaluation or assessment meets the purpose(s) of the etivity. If assessment is involved, look for alignment with tasks. Attempts to forcefully create participation through direct assessment are rarely successful. 4. Build in motivation as part of the process of undertaking the e-tivity itself and not as something separate from it. Motivation occurs because of the learning activities. Avoid trying to motivate people to simply log-on, and ‘discuss’, instead provide an e-tivity that makes taking part worthwhile. 5. Create an experience that is complete and worthwhile in itself. This includes setting short-term goals but ensuring there is a satisfying process and ‘flow’ of actions. In practice, e-moderators need to exercise judgement about when to go with the flow and when to guide students towards expected outcomes. 6. Be highly sensitive to timing and pacing. Divide the e-tivity up into bite sized chunks – no more than 2 or 3 weeks’ work for a complete e-tivity, less if you can. 7. If you offer more than one e-tivity at a time, build them together in a coherent way to create a ‘programme’. Use the 5-stage model. 8. Ensure that the e-tivities are in some way focussed on sharing, shaping, elaborating or deepening understanding. 9. Ensure that students need to work together in some way to achieve the learning outcomes. If you cannot see the way to make working together worthwhile, maybe using e-tivities is not the best approach? 10. Be generous in allocating e-moderator time, especially if the e-tivity is geared towards stages 1-3. 11. Be ready, be prepared, and don’t be surprised at serendipitous events. 12. Aim to provide just one instructional message, which contains everything needed to take part. Each instructional message e-tivity should include: 1. The purpose of the e-tivity (why the students are doing it). If the e-tivities is assessed, indicate what might indicate success and how they can achieve it. 2. What students should do and how they can go about doing it. 3. How long it should or could take. An idea of when the e-tivity starts and when it should finish. 4. How the students should work together. |
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