Learning Activities

Finding and/or gathering course content can be a great challenge for faculty and course designers. By taking advantage of the time to acquire media content while out in the field, this can provide a great opportunity to turn those resources into multiple types of online content for students.

Kick off an online course with an asynchronous goal-setting icebreaker where students can form community and intentional goals for the course. This activity can be extended with goal progress check-ins throughout the semester for continued engagement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) that generate text, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can support authentic assessment by facilitating opportunities for professional roleplaying. ChatGPT responds to user prompts in a conversational structure, and it builds on previous content as the dialogue continues. In an asynchronous online environment, this immediate feedback can simulate a live conversation. Therefore, ChatGPT…

Online learning activities using shared documents to promote collaborative work is one approach that may facilitate student engagement and learning. By creating shared templates for students to complete in groups, students collaborate with classmates to apply learning and ultimately contribute to a shared outcome. While a great deal of academic work is produced independently, this…

Conrad and Donaldson note that the shift from the instructor as provider of knowledge to the “the instructor as facilitator of active student learning” began well before the introduction of online learning, with the work of John Dewey, who emphasized “diverse and meaningful peer collaboration” in learning environments. One of the ways to foster significant…

With instruction shifting from face-to-face to online modalities, instructors at all levels are lecturing synchronously using video-conferencing platforms. As an unintended result, instructors and students alike have reported feeling overwhelmed and drained due to the amount of time they have spent on these platforms (Wiederhold, 2020). In fact, the term “Zoom fatigue” has been coined…

The case method group activity is an instructional design strategy that involves faculty members providing one or more case studies to which groups of students respond. The case(s) could be a real-life case or simulation. It could be description of key concept(s) applied, a story or scenario, an actual case study, a problem or mystery,…

Learning retention can be encouraged and reinforced through the integration of real-life examples and artifacts into course material (Chrestensen, 2007).

Good course design involves alignment of course and lesson objectives with relevant activities and assessments.

Simulation with sophisticated manikins or standardized patients has firmly established itself as an effective teaching practice in nursing and medical education (Liaw, et.al., 2015; Shin, Park & Kim, 2015). Although mastering many skills of advanced practice nursing requires high fidelity simulation, the thinking processes – diagnostic reasoning and clinical decision-making – can be successfully learned…