Points of Attention for making Online Modules

Some points of attention for teaching modules online 200406, Piet Murre

Preface From de WHY project there was a request for a short document that help teachers with teaching modules online. What are important issues, also in comparison with real life education? In this document, we present some notions that transcend the level of tools and tips. They give guidance for the selection and use of it.

There are two components: some general points of attention and a selection of empirically tested and widely recognised principles for the "how".

You can then go to very concrete teaching methods. It will differ to what extent all information is new, useful and/or applicable for you.

Some broad outlines Important elements of good education also apply to distance education, even though you have to shape them differently and emphasize them in another way/more. This includes, for example, actively maintaining a relationship with the students, so that they feel seen and known; that is doing a lot with a little attention; have students come to the lectures well prepared and then building on that during the lectures; have them focus on what they cannot do by themselves or together (meaning, higher-order goals, et cetera); establish interaction among themselves and with the subject matter to prevent tacit drop outs.

Online requires more structuring (in advance), both in terms of preparation (asynchronous) as during online lectures (synchronous) and checking more often/regularly whether instructions are clear.

Be merciful to yourself and others. A pitfall is to want to translate your normal way of working directly into an "online" version of it. It is better to do a few things well than to try to transfer "everything" fully.

The standard way of making lessons and modules is often thought from (your knowledge of the initial situation of students towards) the learning goals (1) and the summative assessment at the end (2). Then a learning route is designed (3) with content, activities, and feedback. Especially (3), and perhaps (2) as well, you will have to partially redo for an online module. This way of working has its value. A risk can be that only "SMART goals" will be taken into account (whereas not everything that has value is measurable) and a second risk can be that too much will be reasoned from detailed schedules (whereas learning is affected by so many factors that education should not be mechanistic).

A more open but certainly no less in-depth approach is based on "design principles".

Besides the seven design principles of the Didactic Diamond (Murre, 2019), you can also think by analogy with, for example, the architecture of buildings and spaces. This includes visual centres, boundaries, cohesion and connection, relaxation, public and personal spaces, repetition and variation (Bradley, 2018).

Good teachers in higher education also apply general principles, which can then be condensed into a limited number of guidelines or design questions (e.g. Bain, 2004).

As a teacher, you apply these to give concrete form to modules and lessons, just as a chef applies certain principles to come to a recipe (e.g. Sennett, 2008).

Onderzoekscentrum Driestar educatiefŠ, 2020.

Learning through multimedia: how?

If you know what you are aiming for with your module (the ideal, the goal), the question about the "how" also arises. Research into digital didactics has yielded a number of principles that have been tested empirically. These help to plan teaching methods and such. There are three underlying assumptions (related to "cognitive load theory"). First of all, that there are two channels ("dual channels") for processing visual or auditory information. Secondly, our working memory can only process a limited number of new elements at a time (4-7). The third one states that people actively (have to) process and integrate information with the knowledge they already had, for example by comparing, generalising, listing and classifying that information. These three points have significant consequences for the structure of lessons and series of lessons and are identifiable in the table with "multimedia learning principles" you find below (Mayer, 2014).

Principle Multimedia principle: Split-attention principle Modality principle Coherence, signalling, spatial & temporal contiguity, and redundancy principles

Segmenting, pretraining, and modality principles

Personalisation, and embodiment principles

Description (quotes from Mayer, 2014, p. 8)  People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.  People learn better when words and pictures are physically and temporally integrated.  People learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics and printed text.  People learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included,  when cues are added that highlight the organisation of the essential information,  when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the screen or page or in time,  people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text.  People learn better when a multimedia message is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit,  people learn better from a multimedia message when they (already) know the names and characteristics of the main concepts,  people learn better when the words are spoken rather than written.  People learn better when the words of a multimedia presentation are in conversational style rather than formal style,  however, people do not necessarily learn better when the speaker’s image is on the screen.

Resources Badley, K. (2018). Curriculum Planning with Design Language. Building Elegant Courses and Units. London: Routledge.

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Mayer, R.E. (2014). The Cambridge handbook of Multimedia Learning. New York (NY): Cambridge University Press.

Mc Tighe, J., Wiggins, G. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria (VA): ASCD. Murre, P.M. (2019). Meer door minder. Het geven van een vakles vanuit christelijk perspectief. Gouda: Driestar educatief.

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. London: Penguin Books.

Onderzoekscentrum Driestar educatief©, 2020.