Speaker 1: So, in this video, we're going to talk a little bit about learning activities and how to make sure your learning activities are aligned with your learning objectives and your assessments. So, in almost all pedagogical traditions, there's three very basic steps. First, you define your learning objectives. Second, you define assessments to let you know and your students know whether or not they've achieved those learning objectives. And the final part is designing the learning activities which help your students both perform in the assessments and of course achieve the learning objectives. So, today we're going to talk about developing your learning activities and we're going to use what I'm calling the Think Plus One method. So, this fellow here is a de-think and he's a fantastic educator and instructional designer and he's written extensively about designing courses in higher ed. And he talks about three different types of learning activities that you should have for each learning objective in your course. And those are informational activities, experiential activities, and reflective activities. So, let's take each of these elements one at a time. So, let's start with informational activities. So, basically, with informational activities, you want to ask yourself what information or ideas are necessary for your students to achieve their learning goals, right? And then you're going to just provide your students with whatever readings or lectures, videos, that could be primary source materials, whatever it is that they'll need to provide that sort of knowledge foundation for them to be successful in achieving their learning goal. The next type of activities are the experiential activities, or the experiences. And what you should ask yourself when you start designing these types of activities is what types of activities, observations, or practices will help your students to achieve their goal. What's true for experience in general is true for learning experiences, right? These learning experiences that you're constructing, right? You can either experience something by doing something, or you can have an experience by observing something. And you can incorporate these kinds of doing or observing activities into your course. So, when you're designing learning experience that students do, you can make these really authentic to your field or profession, right? And these might be really interpretive. They might be very research-based, right? Students might be furrowing through the library or the archives. They might be different kinds of lab activities. They might be a visit to a site, an internship or externship, right? Anything that would be really authentic to what an actual practitioner in the field would do. In some cases, your learning objectives won't lend themselves to authentic practice. However, you should still have experiential activities where students can practice a particular skill, maybe reinforce a concept, or simulate a particular process. And these types of activities can include simulations, case studies, debates, games, collaborative activities, et cetera. Anything that allows a student to put into practice the skills or concepts that you're trying to teach. Sometimes your learning objectives will lend themselves to your students' experience something, but it's just simply not practical for your students to do that thing. So in this case, it's perfectly fine to set up the conditions where your students can observe that activity. Whether that's a demonstration or whether that's a video or some other kind of thing of an actual process, or it's a story or a narrative. The final type of learning activity that DEEF finds essential to incorporate into your overall learning activities for each objective is a reflective activity. And these types of activities provide a space for the student to reflect on the learning activities, on the other learning activities, the readings, the information, the experiences, and to see how those experiences connect and activities connect with each other, and how they connect with the overall learning objectives. DEEF talks about the importance of reflective activities being a dialogue, either being a dialogue with yourself or with others. This dialogic quality of experience lends itself to the types of activities that you'll assign. So some of these activities where you'll be in dialogue with others would be debriefings, class or small group discussions, forum activities, some which would be dialogue with yourself might be journaling, various kinds of writing assignments or papers. But the goal again for these reflective activities so the students can see the connections between these various learning activities and each other, those various learning activities and the course objectives, as well as their own learning, right, as the connections between these activities and their own learning processes. Now those three types of activities, information activities, experience activities, reflective activities are DEEF's three types of learning activities. I have my own. This is my plus one. And my plus one is practice, practice, practice, practice. So your learning objectives may require students to master some kind of skill, maybe they have to master some kind of activity, maybe it's vocabulary. If they do, you should build in some methods for your students to practice these activities, right. That should be part of your course design. DEEF doesn't really go into this, but I think it's a really important component. So that is my plus one. To wrap up, I have three quick final thoughts. So first, learning activities don't need to be isolated to a particular learning objective. Learning activities can be tied to multiple learning objectives, and they can span multiple modules in your course, right. DEEF actually calls these rich learning experiences. However, if you have these types of learning activities in your course, and you should, the reflective component is really, really important, so students can discover how these learning activities are connected to everything else in the course. Second thought is that there's a very fuzzy line about what a formative assessment is and what a learning activity is, and when it comes down to it, the distinction's really not that important, so don't spend a lot of time trying to classify what one thing is or another. You should include both of these in your course, and if they're there, great, and that's all that matters. So the last thought is how everything sort of fits together, right. So everything should be aligned, right. Your learning objectives should be driving what your assessments and your learning activities are. However, as you're designing your course, this is a really iterative process, so you might find that you might need to make some changes to your assessments after you've developed your learning activities or to your learning objectives, and vice versa, and that's fine. All right, that's all for now. I'll see you in the forums. Bye-bye.