Learner-Content Interaction
“The first type of interaction is interaction between the learner and the content or subject of study…The oldest form of distance teaching that aimed to facilitate interaction with content was the didactic text.”
Moore, M. (1989)
“Good design is crucial in education because much of the learning that students undertake is without direct supervision, meaning that learners only have designed instructions, artifacts, and scaffolding to guide their activity”
Bower, M. (2017)
“In preparing instruction for learner-content interaction the educator can design written and recorded material that aims to motivate, make presentations, facilitate application, evaluate, and even provide a degree of student affective support. ”
Moore, M. (1989)
- Variety of content and activities:
- readings, video, websites, online exemplars
- reading responses, reflections/journals, case studies, quizzing
- Resources should be contextualized, and opportunities for feedback should be included throughout the course (Chakraborty & Nafukho, 2014)
- Relevance is key in adult learning, practical value of activities beyond the duration of the course establishes relevance (Knowles, 1984)
- Encourage active reflection and self-assessment (Duncan & Barnett, 2009; Pawan et al., 2003)
Look through the content of your course and consider what you ask students to do independently. Then consider the following:
- How do you currently facilitate clear explanations and descriptions when information is not readily available from selected learning materials? Consider, for example, letting learners know why you want them to access these resources, and what they should be looking for.
- Where could you include reflection as part of project assignments? (e.g. on the process they went through , and how that process impacted their learning.) If you were to include reflection, how might it be continuous, connected, challenging, and contextualized? (Eyler, J., Giles, D.E. & Schmiede, A. 1996.)
- Where might students reflect on their own strategies for learning and behaviours? Crosslin (2018) provides a series of exercises one might try such as: The Multitasking Exercise, Journal Writing, Deep Reflection.
- Where in your course might you incorporate experiential learning, case studies, and problem-based activities designed to immerse learners in real world scenarios? (Caulfield, 2016)
- Where might Self-Assessment fit into your course? (Dingwall, 2017)
The dialog card has several different iterations available, one of which acts as a set of digital flashcards. The learner can shuffle, draw a selection, remove cards correctly guessed, etc. The designer can include text, audio, images, and hints for each card in a deck. This activity is from HORT27: Woody Landscape Plants, Module 4: Deciduous Trees.
The following timeline is used as part of the course learning materials in Drama 108: What is Theatre?, Module 3: Evolution of Western Theatre