Consistency in formats, fonts, and even color of font used is very important in helping students learn what you want them to learn. I have developed courses for in person/face to face delivery and I learned in the past that it was also true for those courses. Some of these principles have already been used by the instructional department at my university. Our learning management system has been set up to facilitate this kind of consistency in the overall course map so it is easier to plan our courses around the basic template. I plan to start a Learning Objects folder to keep some of the materials that I have developed for a course that I just completed revising.
Module consistency and chunking of info.
Learned how important module consistency is for the students and plan to make more efforts towards this.
The text formatting, navigation, shapes and colors must be consistent with other modules. Too much emphasis is no emphasis at all when it comes to using bold and italics.
I learned that being consistant is key, and that although consistancy is important it is best to change things up within the modules so that the students stay interested.
The strongest message I got from this information is to design a template and keep your class set up the same. This way students know where to find all the informatiom, classes look the same, and its easier to design new courses or add and delete things in the current one.
I plan to utilize the skills
Templates, learning objects, videos not to be more than 5-10 min long.
Reply to Gulsebnem Bishop's post: Hi Gulsebnem,
I totally agree with creating formats and templates is always useful to develop automaticity to be able to help and guide the students to capture learning objectives faster.
Make sure the modules contains
1. Lessons
2. Discussions
3. Assesment/Post Assesment
4.
In this module i learned that consistency is key for students to learn and retain information
Chunking is a great concept that provides a way to make the information manageable.
I have learned that by organizing course topics by content or by dates can help students in easily finding course contents in the learning management system that schools will use. Using video clips are also helpful in reiforcing learning objectives, and it will be helpful to divide them into segments, so that students will not get bored.
Consistency in the course content tends to allow students to become more comfortable knowing what is expected from them.
For the organization of the course, I like to use the Weeks since it is easy for students to see what chapters and assignmetns are due each week.
We can use Edverum as the learning-bjects database and also the McGraw textbooks have Connect and ALEKS as a source of practice questions and virtual activities.
The importance of being consistant throughout every module is clearly highlighted.
When developing curricula it is important to maintain a consistent format so that students know what to expect from each module and section.
I plan to use chunking in order to better link the material to the larger concept.
During the pandemic I have been teaching all my classes online and have tried to structure them similar to each other. I never thought about using a database to speed up the process. I can understand how beneficial it will be for a database as we move more into online eduction.
I think the biggest thing I learned was also consistency. Sometimes I would feel that I would have to change things to keep it interesting but I have to put myself in their shoes and think what a difference consistency could bring. Reinforcing that thought was a very nice tip.
