Student to Content Interactions
When planning student-to-content interaction:
- Create activities that are engaging, accessible, and related to learning outcomes
- Provide students with the opportunity to test their knowledge, practice skills, or reflect on the course content throughout the course
- Consider giving students the opportunity to contribute to course content and resources
Interactions between students and course content can take various forms, such as reading informational texts, watching instructional videos, listening to podcasts, using software, participating in virtual labs or simulations, or working on assigned projects.
Research has found that students who frequently interact with online content are more engaged, receive higher grades (Chao, Hwu, & Chang, 2011; Rodrigues & Armellini, 2013), and are more likely to pass the course (Zimmerman, 2012) compared to students who do not interact with online content. In order to motivate students to spend time interacting with your course, and to deepen their overall learning, ensure that the content is easy to access, engaging, and promotes meaningful connections among various tasks.
Opportunities for content interaction
Below are some suggestions for engaging student with the content in your course.
- Facilitate activities that promote deeper engagement with the content such as self-evaluation using peerScholar (opens in new window) through your Brightspace course shell.
- To increase (google doc) reading compliance (external link, opens in new window) , incorporate (google doc) reflective writing (external link, opens in new window) such as using a journal activity
- To assess student learning using a short writing assignment, ask students to complete a (google doc) one-minute paper (external link, opens in new window) or the (google doc) muddiest (clearest) point (external link, opens in new window) and submit it to D2L Brightspace (opens in new window) .
- To encourage discussions related to the course readings, ask students to post a “Digital Postcard” with a one or two sentence summary of the week’s reading, plus an image that reflects their understanding of the topic using the discussion board (opens in new window) or WordPress blog (opens in new window) .
- Provide students with opportunities to test their knowledge by using interactive, low-stakes quizzes through D2L Brightspace quiz (opens in new window) .
- To provide students with the opportunity to recall course material, check their understanding of material, and give you on-the-spot feedback, use polling techniques (external link, opens in new window) through Zoom.
- To help students become familiar with the course expectations and components of the syllabus, ask them to complete a (google doc) scavenger hunt activity (external link, opens in new window) through D2L Brightspace quiz (opens in new window) .
- To encourage knowledge acquisition and enhance research skills, ask students to develop research questions and hypotheses before viewing a virtual lab demonstration which can be submitted through D2L Brightspace (opens in new window) .
- To facilitate students’ exploration of course content and promote the relationships among concepts, use concept mapping, (external link, opens in new window) and ask students to upload them to Google Drive (opens in new window) or D2L Brightspace (opens in new window) .
- To help students practice visualization of content, ask students to create graphs that can be uploaded to Google Drive (opens in new window) or D2L Brightspace (opens in new window) .
References
Chao, C. Y., Hwu, S. L., & Chang, C. C. (2011). Supporting interaction among participants of online learning using the knowledge sharing concept. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology-TOJET, 10(4), 311-319.
Padilla Rodriguez, B. C., & Armellini, A. (2013). Student engagement with a content-based learning design. Research in learning technology, 21(2013).
Zimmerman, T. D. (2012). Exploring learner to content interaction as a success factor in online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(4), 152-165.