3 Why are Arrival Activities Important?

Research suggests that arrival activities deepen student engagement, strengthen motivation, build student enthusiasm, and foster community through social learning. In addition, these types of activities can increase feelings of connectedness between the instructor and students, and assist in providing the instructor with feedback on student experiences and the course’s progress and impact. Since we have highlighted student engagement and activating emotional investment earlier in this work, we are going to emphasize a few other impacts of arrival activities below.

Sharpens Active Learning Skills

Arrival activities have been found to create more time for instructors to focus on active learning and the active engagement of students by preparing them to engage with and connect to course content before class begins. Moravec and colleagues^[1] found that “learn before lecture (LBL)” assignments, in combination with interactive exercises, helped increase student engagement and content understanding. Arrival activities can also be effective at helping students acquire new skills. Sharples^[2] observed that students could develop a variety of skills from gaming (complex digital games) as an arrival activity. These skills included strategy and problem-solving, understanding consequences, coordination, and teamwork – all of which are important skills for students to develop during their time in higher education.

Foster Community through Social Learning

Arrival activities also facilitate community through social learning. For example, game-enhanced learning (GEL) has been known to increase student performance and engagement.^[3] Serious games, as a branch of video games designed for purposes other than solely entertainment, have been found to have major applications in “education and training, engineering, healthcare, military applications, city planning, production, crisis response” and other fields.^[4] Finally, gamification and serious gaming have an important relationship to social learning, which is key to improving educational practices and infrastructure in the future.^[5] Arrival activities are important to the social learning and development of students for a number of reasons, as outlined above, and they can serve as useful functions in an online course.

Showing Genuine Care

Pedagogies of kindness^[6][7] and care are core to establishing feelings of connection amongst students. One way that instructors can signpost care is by showing a genuine interest in the student experience and by gathering feedback to increase instructor awareness of the students’ situations. Arrival activities can help create a feeling of dialogue and perspective-taking when contributions are shared anonymously.