Creating learning activities and assessments

Your second step with the Instructional Design Wizard is to create or enter the activities you want to use in the course and plan how you want to assess learner progress. The wizard differentiates between two types of activities:

• Assessment activities give you a means to assess learners' progress.
• Content activities are the resources and support for learners to learn the course material.

Designing assessments

Selecting assessments before designing content helps remind you that assessments in each module should align with the module objectives and not just the content. If you state the objectives clearly and make them measurable, the assessments should enable that direct measurement. The Design Content step then enables you to include the learning experiences that support the assessments using the “Teach to the Test” method. 

Pick assessment activities for each module from a list organized by objective, approach, and learning levels. The list you see should be appropriate for the learning levels for the learning objective you selected (defined when you classify learning objectives in the Setting learning objectives step). You must select one or more instructional approaches to access the activities list.

Approach	Description
Direct Instruction	Instructor-directed knowledge construction, or developing step-by-step skills
Indirect Instruction	Student involvement in observing, investigating, drawing inferences from data, or forming hypotheses
Independent Learning	Fosters the development of initiative, self-reliance, and self-improvement
Collaborative Learning	Learn from peers and develop social skills
Experiment and Discover	Learn by doing, develop affective and psychomotor skills

If you don't see the activities you want to use, try changing which approach you've selected.

Once you select the activities, specify whether each assessment is diagnostic, summative, or formative, and which assessment tool you are using to enable the assessment:

• Diagnostic assessments typically occur at the beginning of the course or before each unit of study and focus on determining learners’ knowledge, skill level, needs, motivation, and interest levels.
• Formative assessments typically occur continuously throughout the course and measure learners’ progress before the summative assessments, providing time to influence the learning process. They focus on the process and products of learning and inform both the learner and instructor about the learning process.
• Summative assessments typically occur at the end of a unit or at the end of a period of study and measure learners’ performance level with the result directly contributing to their final grade.

You must also choose which Learning Environment tool supports this activity, such as: Chat, Discussions, Calendar, etc.

Note  If you can't find the tool you want in the list of tools, choose Select a tool later.

Designing content activities

Select the activities that make up the content for your course. When you add content to the modules, the wizard takes into account what your learning objectives are for the modules, and what approach you choose. From this, it provides a list of suitable activities. Each activity shows what level from Bloom's Taxonomy it's related to, and what type of activity it is. You can display a description of each activity if you want to know more about it.

If you don't see the activities you want to use, try changing which approach you've selected.

When you choose the content activities, include learning resources and learning supports to complement learning activities:

• Learning Resources Pedagogical material that transfers knowledge to learners, such as: presentations, books, documents, websites, etc.
• Learning Supports Managerial tools and technical tasks that facilitate learning sessions, such as: your office hours, tutorials, a glossary, schedules, checklists, FAQ's, etc.

You must also choose which Learning Environment tool supports this activity, such as: Chat, Discussions, Calendar, etc.

Note  If you can't find the tool you want in the list of tools, choose Select a tool later.