Course outline
The course is structured around a series of learning activities, divided up into approximately one week at a time but forming an integrated path through the topic and related issues. We start by prompting your thoughts on learning before working in groups to design and then evaluate an online learning activity. In the final week, you are invited to offer your own learning activity up for review by the course members, so this is something you should consider from the start.
Induction/getting started
Finding your way around the course site, completing a quiz on managing your time, announcing your arrival to others in the course and familiarising yourself with the textbook and the course material in Brookes Virtual.
Topic 1: Learners and learning environments
A series of short, guided tasks where we begin to consider the elements of learning activity design by taking a tour of a variety of online courses ‘out there’. Our particular focus in this week is how we might design for our learners, taking into account their readiness to learn.
Topic 2: Learning activity design
We now move the focus from our individual tasks to working together to use design ideas and tools to support you in groups in designing a learning activity that integrates external learning resources and some form of assessment. One of the challenges of this week is how you might adequately represent your design.
Topic 3: Evaluating learning designs
In this week, the groups showcase their designs and gain feedback from each other. You are asked to set the learning activity in a wider course context and consider some of the broader issues of implementation. We also start to construct an evaluation rubric that might support further development of the activity.
Week 4: Your design and your issues
Building on our experiences throughout this course, this week gives you the opportunity to build and present your own learning activity design, and to apply the evaluation rubric that we constructed the previous week to give feedback on the activity designs that others are presenting.
What now on day 1?
Explore the course site and begin the induction activities.
Start a reflective log of your learning on the course, in particular around what you want to design in the final week, and gather thoughts or handy resources to support this as you work through the course activities. We recommend that you do this outside of the course environment because otherwise you will not have access to these notes beyond the end of the course.
Check in the Announcements section for any special announcements from tutors e.g. any anticipated downtime of Brookes Virtual during the course will be announced there.
