I have posted previously on the importance of showing students what success looks like in an eLearning environment. Whether via a rubric or by the example of a previous student submission, letting students see how they can be successful with an assignment or activity in your course is generally a good idea.
This post will help you discover how to utilize a tool that your students will use in their activities by employing it to display course content or provide course communication. That’s right, you are getting two for the price of one!
The Wiki Tool
The wiki tool can be the most rewarding/frustrating tool in your arsenal of activities that you have in your eLearning courses. Providing students with instructions on how to use the tool is definitely important, but many times they don’t end up using it the way you intended. This may be because they didn’t have an example or the 1 page example didn’t really show how a completed wiki should look.
Example: Use a wiki to display course topic or content.
Let’s say one of your course modules deals with Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development/Learning. Create a Wiki to display the content across multiple wiki pages:
- Page 1 – Wiki Home – Overall introduction of unit
- Page 2 – About Piaget – Biographical/historical look complete with picture
- Page 3 – Cognitive Development: Explainer on Piaget’s theory
- Page 4 – Cognitive Learning Today: Embedded video and text
Leave one page with places for your student to add their own text to the wiki demonstrating how a wiki should work in practice.
The Blog Tool
In today’s day and age it easy to make the assumption that all students know how to use a blog or are familiar with journaling due to social media. However, this is generally not the case as most social media posts are micro-blogs (very short 126 characters or less) and full of emojis, text-speak and hashtags.
Example: Use a Course Blog to summarize the week/topic/module, provide commentary on student performance and provide a look into the next week/unit/topic.
This example allows you to demonstrate how a blog works and allows you to communicate important news and information to your students.
Each week make a blog post that:
- Summarizes what the students went over
- Provides kudos for student performance
- Provides encouragement for student struggles
- Allows for commentary to point out important details about the course content.
- Gives students a preview/intro into the next unit.
- Be sure to use multimedia so that students see what the blog can do.
*Use other communication tools in your course (announcements, e-mails, calendar entries) to remind students to check the blog. Be sure to encourage students to comment on your blog posts (a few bonus points for your top 3 commenters across a semester).
Both of these activities will give your students a good idea about how they can use these tools to complete the activities/assignments that you have placed in your course.
This strategy works with multiple types of tools/activities in and outside your LMS. Things like VoiceThread, GoogleDocs, course hashtags and many others are easy to pair with the “Seeing is Believing” idea.
Hopefully, by employing these types of strategies in your online/hybrid/web-enhanced courses, you can reduce student anxiety and increase student success!
eLearning Frenzy 