Planning individual lessons
When it comes to creating a lesson plan, it’s helpful to start with a few questions to determine the goal of your lesson.
• What do your students already know?
• What do they need to learn?
• What’s the best way to lock it in place?
A class outline is important for two reasons:
Know the destination.
If you know where you’re going, it helps you think about what steps your students need to reach that point. What skills do they need to develop along the way? What foundations do you need to establish at the outset? Much like a cross-country road trip, if you start out the journey without a clear sense of where you’re going and how you intend to get there, the likelihood is that you’ll get lost along the way. You wouldn’t teach a child to tell the time before they learn to count; likewise, you can’t teach someone to be a great cocktail master before you teach them about in-gredients, measures, and how to mix.
Set expectations.
Laying out a roadmap sets expectations for your students. Where you’re about to serve up puzzle pieces of brand new facts and skills, your course outline is their picture on the box. It helps them know where they’re going, which important pieces to pay close attention to, and how to place them in context with one another. Giving your students a sense of their destination helps them invest in the educational journey with you.
For each class, back up your learning content with two things:
Learning resources.
Provide extra readings, infographics, videos, and other educational content across a variety of formats. These create opportunities for your students to absorb information in multiple formats to help them retain knowledge and build context between topics. This also ensures you cater for students who learn differently – some learn through reading, others by listening, others through pictures or infographics. By providing a range of learning resources to back up your content, you ensure a diverse learning experience for every student who takes your course.
Practice activities.
We all know practice makes perfect, right? Give your students the opportunity to put their new-ly-honed skills to the test before you move on to the next batch of new information. Practice ac-tivities promote knowledge retention and help students lock skills into place before you teach them something new. You could create a quiz on the course builder, or assign a group conversa-tion exercise on your community site or other online group. It’s important to keep in mind that practice activities are not a test. They’re just a safe space for your students to get their hands dirty and master a particular skill before they face a situation where they have to wield these skills independently! You can go old-school with a multiple-choice quiz, or get creative with something out of the box. The sky’s the limit – just give students an opportunity to practice what you taught them!
Don’t forget gamification!
Gamification can help to make learning more enjoyable, immersive and accessible, resulting in higher uptake and ongoing participation. When we talk about gamification, we don’t just mean quizzes or polls. It can be as simple or as complex as you like, from quick fire question rounds to gamified scenario-based simulations. Ultimately the key aim is to grab (and keep!) the attention of your learners and motivate them to get involved. When it comes to gamified online learning, it’s not usually about designing a full-blown video game. It’s about taking elements that make games engaging, motivating or educational and incorporating those into the learning experiences you design.
To use gamification in online learning, it’s best practice to incorporate elements such as:
Stories
Create a compelling storyline to captivate your users and take them on a journey. Create a story that embeds users in the plot as they tackle each section of the content. This is a great way to cre-ate immersive content and keep learners engaged throughout. (We already talked a lot about sto-rytelling in this booklet!)
Visual design
Eye-catching visuals and aesthetically pleasing designs can make your online learning more ap-pealing and draw your students in. Combine bright colors and graphics for a visually-stimulating learning experience.
Competitions
Who doesn’t love a bit of healthy competition? Allow students to compete against others in their team or anonymous players, or even against themselves to keep motivation levels high. Consider including leaderboards so learners can see how they’re performing against their peers.
Challenges
Reward your learners with smaller, more frequent tasks and then ramp up the difficulty level as the session progresses. This will not only help them get into the swing of things, but leave them primed and ready for more difficult, rewarding challenges using what they have learnt along the way.
Rewards
Incentivizing your students in the way of rewards such as badges, medals or unlocking new lev-els can help to boost their motivation and keep them engaged for longer periods of time.