LEARNING THROUGH ACTIVITIES

Every learning activity in the project should be intentional, meaningful and useful. Activities should build on previous activities and avoid being repetitive, they should enable students to engage with and develop their skills, knowledge and understandings in different ways.

It is important that each activity is meaningful, and ensures student development and advancement through the process. Meaningful activities engage students in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative ways

Useful learning activities are ones where the student is able to take what they have learnt from engaging with the activity and use it in another context, or for another purpose. For example, students are able to directly apply the skills or knowledge they acquired to an assessment task, or to perform an activity in their homw just followint the same patterns.

Content Focus

Activities which involve student interaction with content can include listening to and/or watching a live or recorded talk, engaging with a written or visual text, engaging with multimedia, or a combination of these. Typically, students are more likely to retain information presented in these ways if they are asked to interact with the material in some way, which is why it is useful to ask or invite questions, or include another activity type after every 5 or 15 minute 'chunk' of information.

Interactivity (with Others) Focus

Activities that focus on or include interaction with others can support student development of a range of learning outcomes, inclusive of declarative and functioning knowledge. So it is important including learning activities that foster open communication and group cohesion (as ways of fostering social presence) as well as providing opportunities for active learning are important in every activity.

Critical Thinking

Activities that provide students with opportunities to think about or use knowledge and information in new and different ways will support their development of critical thinking skills - one of the main selling points of a university education. Often critical thinking activities can follow on from other learning activities, after students have received feedback from the initial activity.

Production

Asking students to produce something can be an effective way of assisting them to engage with ideas and concepts at the level you wish them to. It can be a way of facilitating 'deep' learning. Worth noting here, is that with the ubiquitousness of technology and its capabilities now, the requirement of production being predominantly written no longer exists, with the range of possible forms of production ever increasing, bounded only by your imaginations.

Problem Solving

Presenting students with a problem, scenario, case, challenge or design issue, which they are then asked to resolve, address, meet, or deal with provides students with a visible and clear reason for learning. If, in order to solve the problem, they are required to have knowledge, understandings and skills, that they don't currently have, they are likely to be motivated to gain them. The scale and extent of the problem, and the amount of scaffolding provided by you, the teacher, will need careful consideration and reference to the learning outcomes of the unit, module and/or session.

Reflection

Reflection is an activity that supports the development of students' meta-cognition, that is, their understanding of how they think, learn, and understand. The process of reflection starts with the student thinking about what they already know and have experienced in relation to the topic being explored/learnt. This is followed by analysis of why the student thinks about the topic in the way they do, and what assumptions, attitudes and beliefs they have about, and bring to learning about the topic.