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Informational, Active and Collaborative Learning Activities
In this learning activity, we will introduce you to informational, active, and collaborative learning activities. We list some examples, advantages, and disadvantages for each and invite you to start thinking about which activity types might work well in your course. Alignment with course objectives continues to be important because your activities will provide the necessary learning or practice that lead to fair and valid assessment.
Selecting Appropriate Learning Activities
We now consider the learning activities for your course.
“As with other educational design, creating effective e-learning relies on having tasks for students to undertake that provide an experience likely to lead them to the desired new understanding. Despite the apparent obviousness of this requirement, it seems all too easy for providers of e-learning to become carried away with, or distracted by, other design elements and to overlook the necessity of providing a rich learning activity. A rich activity is one that opens up opportunities for action rather than directs students down a prescribed pathway” (Brown and Voltz, 2005, para. 8).
In this seminar, we will use three broad categories to help you consider the purpose of your learning activity: informational, active, and collaborative. The following descriptions and examples of learning activities will help you see how different learning activities may be classified into these three categories. Since no single type of learning activity will work for every type of learning objective, we will also consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of each category. Please note that each type of learning activities is “appropriate” as long as it helps the student achieve the learning objective(s).
Informational Learning Activities
Informational learning activities present important information to individuals in an efficient way. For example, they may require students to read a chapter in a textbook, review pages on a website, view a presentation, or to think about what is being presented.
Examples
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- Readings
- Slide presentations
- Narrated or recorded lectures
- Podcasts
- Video clips
- Orienting activities
- Illustrations
- Visual organizers
- Content previews
- Structured overviews
- Worked examples
Advantages
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- Efficiently presents a large volume of foundational knowledge
- Provides students a “mental break” from more intensive learning activities
- Is familiar to students from past learning experiences
- Is most familiar to many faculty and students
- Often provided in textbook or publisher resources
Disadvantages
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- Students may perceive the information or activity as boring or irrelevant
- Often no sure way to know whether students have actually read, listened, or viewed the activity
- External resources may include extraneous or distracting information that make it difficult for student to recognize the intended points
Active Learning Activities
Activ