Lionbridge Content Development

e-Learning Best Practices: Effective Discovery and Practice

 Email Article |  Twitter |  Facebook |   Google Buzz |  digg it |   delicious |   StumbleUpon |   LinkedIn |   Technorati | 

Today, Wendy shares some thoughts on how to create effective, interesting discovery and practice activities within any e-Learning framework...

In my last post (Interactivity versus Multimedia in e-Learning), I posed the idea of passive versus active interaction in e-Learning. I think we tend to rely too much on passive interaction, and don't give enough active opportunities to our e-Learners. I categorized two types of active interaction:

• Discovery - students are presented with a new problem (question, task, etc.) and have to respond, without having received any instruction. The instruction happens within the feedback they receive.
• Practice - give students a problem and ask them to respond, based on previous instruction. The feedback helps reinforce the learning and correct any problems.

So why don't we include more discovery and practice in our e-learning? It seems easier to design a passive interaction. You take your essential content, and chunk it, organize it, and decide how the student will reveal it. OK, this might be an oversimplification, but most passive interaction is really about explaining or demonstrating, which should be the easiest content to gather. So the work is in deciding how you want learners to interact with it.

Effective discovery or practice activities seem more complicated, with more considerations, such as:

• The wide range of possible answers or assumptions a student can give to a question. We can't build them all, so which ones should we include? Which will make the most meaningful activity for the learner?
• The interaction must have an interesting and realistic context which the student can relate to their real-world environment. This doesn't mean you can't be creative with how you position the question, but students have to be able to see how it ties back to their situation.
• The feedback we give must provide the best explanation (for discovery activities) to ensure learners get the right information. For practice questions, you have to predict the most likely responses or mistakes a novice would make in a given situation and provide appropriate feedback.
• The question or task must be challenging enough to have value to the learner. A learner should have to think and work to produce the correct response. You shouldn't be able to answer correctly without actually learning the material.

So here are some questions you can ask to help you create effective, interesting discovery and practice activities:

1. What are the most common situations in which a learner might need this information or perform this task?
2. What are the most common mistakes a novice would make in each situation? The most common pitfalls?
3. Are there situations with greater risk and penalty if the learner performs poorly? This would be a great opportunity for discovery/practice.
4. What do you see when things go wrong? What do you see when things go right?
5. What bad habits do learners have? Is there a simple solution?

Answering these kinds of questions will help you plan the context and situation, plus give you the distracters and feedback you'll need for an effective discovery or practice activity. And in return, you'll get improved reactions and performance from your learners.

Questions? Comments? Any tips to share on creating good discovery and practice questions? Post them here.