This is one of my posts that will probably make no sense at all to people beyond the OU, so apologies if that is you. But for those who are at the OU, and especially those who are academics involved in the production of our materials…
(cc) Rain Rabbit
I run a group within the HSC department on production for academics new(ish) to the OU. We were talking recently about working with the Learning Design categories, and decided it would be useful to try to generate a list between us of different ways in which you could design activities of each type. This isn’t exhaustive, nor definitive, and we make no promises that these are always good suggestions – some of them would have to be done very carefully to to get over the bar of ‘but why on earth would students actually bother to do this?’. But we hope it’s useful to other people scratching their heads to think of non-assimilative activities (although we did include those too).
Assimilative
- Readings – academic and more everyday kinds of texts
- Audio
- Video
- Poetry
- Maps and infographics based on maps
- Images and artwork
- Newspaper headlines
- Personal stories
- Case studies
- Diagrams, inforgrahpics and graphs
Productive
- Filling in a grid (gives more structure than free text ‘take notes’)
- Numerical calculations
- Make a powerpoint or other presentation
- Do an elevator pitch
- Draw a spider diagram or concept map
- Write a briefing for a named audience
- Write a tweet or headline
- Write a blog entry
- List of key points
- Use the existing sticky notes tool on the VLE
- Diagram which you can write on or manipulate or put sticky notes on
- Make some notes (boring!)
- Precis activities (e.g. rewrite in your own words, not more than 200 words)
- Take a photo
- Caption competition or cartoon bubble filling
- Curating a collection of images or something else
- Highlighting parts of text (highlighter tool in Word or offline versions)
Finding and Handling information
- USE THE LIBRARY’S EXISTING TUTORIALS ON Digital Information Literacy
- Access databases and other data sources and then extract some information
- Finding a journal article or book from a catalogue
- Doing a citation search
- Following up a reference of your choice from a set reading
- Generate your own data (avoid anything that’s close to interviewing people because of research ethics!)
- Finding and evaluating infographics
- Working with graphs and other pictorial data
Communicative
- Forums (selectively and carefully used only)
- Facebook and other social media independent of the OU
- Talk to your neighbor/friend/other real life contacts
- VLE polls
- Giving and receiving feedback on productive outputs
- Quite complex and well-supported debate e.g. ‘two hats’ type of debate
- Teamworking and pairworking (needs to be carefully structured and supported and with a clear benefit to the students)
Experiential
- THIS ONE IS HARD TO DO and we were least happy about the definition of this one
- Reflective activities
- Trying out a productive output on someone you know and getting feedback on it.
- Trying an activity on yourself e.g. relaxation techniques, you could even include a pre and post test.
Interactive/adaptive
- Drag and drop where it bounces back if incorrect
- Quizzes with feedback on incorrect answers
- Choose between two positions on a complex (often ethical) issue, feedback says ‘that’s valid, but have you also thought about …’ and then summarises the arguments for the opposite position.
- Games and simulations (very time consuming to develop though)
What have we missed? Please do suggest more. And of course let us know if you think we’ve got anything completely wrong.
Remembering My Hat 