Practice and Feedback

• Discussions - Prompted questions on key topics for "virtual" class discussion

• Collaborations - Project work designed for small groups of students

• Web Hunts - Short Internet research projects

• Reflections - Essays on key topics to encourage elaboration

• Journal Exercises - Prompted questions for personal journal writing

• Applications - Opportunities to use lesson content to perform "real world" tasks  

• Research - Traditional research projects using local resources  

• Interactive Exercises

  • Problem Solving - Hypothetical problems, simulations and case studies

  • Learning Games - Crossword puzzles, interactive scenarios, role playing, etc.

  • Flash cards - Online tools to help students memorize key terms and definitions

See special notes on Assessing Student Performance in Distance Learning Environments  

Discussions - Students debate an issue, respond to a question or discuss a case study.  These discussions can be conducted "asynchronously" (students and teacher post their comments on an electronic bulletin board) or "synchronously" (students and teacher participate in a live chat).  But, live chats can be hard to manage with more than about 8 students.  Discussions help emulate the free exchange and interaction experienced in a traditional classroom, and they help students elaborate on the content which improves recall.

Collaborations - small groups of 2 to 4 students work together via email, phone, live chat or electronic bulletin board.  The work can consist of short research/discussions/essays or longer performance tasks that allow students to apply their knowledge to real-world problems.  The output of this collaborative work could be attached to an email to the instructor, or placed in the student's portfolio.

Web Hunts - Students search the Internet for sites related to the subject at hand.  Then, they read and review/reflect.  Response can be via discussion board, journal and/or short essay.

Journal Exercises - Offering questions for students to consider in short journal entries can help students improve their own learning by examining not only what they are learning, but also how they're learning and how they might apply the knowledge in their own lives.

Interactive Exercises - An interactive activity, simulation, case study, or game related to one or more of the learning objectives.

1. Target:  At least one major interactive exercise that spans many lessons, or a series of smaller interactive exercises (no more than one per lesson).  Each exercise must relate to one or more course goals or learning objectives.
    
2. "How To" tips:  These exercises serve the same role as the "activities" described above; they allow students to achieve one or more of the learning objectives.  However, in addition to being valuable instructional tools, interactive exercises are also meant to be fun!  This is the time to light up your creative powers and challenge the limits of the medium.  Keep in mind, our web programmers can build in automatic textual responses, animations, video, audio, etc.  We probably don't have the time or money for exercises that emulate the latest video games, but we can come close. We definitely want to move beyond simple "click and read" and "fill in the text box" activities here.
    
3. Idea prompters:
   
   • For new terms, how about a crossword puzzle, with definitions as the clues?  Check out http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/.
      
   • How about a "story-like" case study with our student as the hero/heroine?  Using the concepts and skills of the lesson, he/she must make decisions and solve problems.  In this case, you would need to script all the different paths or options that the student may choose.  There may be a "right" path, or perhaps the exercise will simply demonstrate the complexity of the issue.
      
   • A simulation that walks the students through a "real-world" procedure in the domain at hand.  Perhaps they manage their next-month's budget by answering prompted questions and using our template.  Or, maybe a lesson in economic forecasting could be demonstrated with a "prediction engine"-the student plugs in values for the independent variables and the dependent variables appear on the screen.