1 Exploring terminology for the online learning environment
Amy Pachai, Ph.D.
In this chapter, you will find…
- There are many ways that online education can be executed and experienced, as described by the different terms and methods described below.
- Constructive alignment is the process of ensuring all the goals, activities, and assessments are connected to one another to create a cohesive learning experience for students.
- All learning experiences (including this course!) benefit from planning and understanding the course goals
Shared vocabulary for online learning
Some terms you may come across as you dive into the world of online learning are included below, but this list is certainly not exhaustive! For a full list of these terms with their definitions, take a look at the bottom of the page in the Resources section. Don’t peek before you attempt the short (5-minute) exercise below!
Keep these concepts in mind as we continue to journey into the world of Digital Experience Design. Our first stop is a deeper dive on Constructive Alignment.
What is constructive alignment? Why should you care?
Learning experiences that don’t engage in a planning process can often feel disjointed, confusing, and unengaging for learners. Imagine an instructor telling a seemingly unrelated anecdote and then, all of a sudden, there’s a pop quiz! On what? You can’t be sure.
The constructive alignment process creates a cohesive experience by focusing on the following three questions:
- Where are you going? (intended learning outcomes)
- How are you going to get there? (teaching & learning activities)
- How do you know that you got there? (feedback & assessment methods)
Answering these questions creates the three points of the constructive alignment triangle, as depicted below:
Creating a course plan that aligns your learning outcomes, teaching activities, and assessment methods makes sure that you have a streamlined structure for your learning experience. It makes sure that you’re teaching all the content and skills you need to and assessing that learning, without adding unnecessary bulk. This framework can and should be applied to any learning experience you are planning, whether online, in-person, or any combination of the two.
Intended Learning Outcomes
Learning outcomes are action-oriented statements that indicate what students will know or be able to do by the completion of the learning experience. They can include:
- Knowledge: What will learners know?
- Skills: What will learners be able to do?
- Values: What will learners value or care about?
Below you will find a standard template for learning outcomes.
By the end of this course/workshop/experience, successful learners will be able to:
action verb to identify the depth of learning expected
+
statement specifying the learning to be demonstrated (i.e., what?)
+
statement to give context or link to assessments (i.e., why? how?)
Learning Outcomes Exercise: Love it or Leave it? (10 minutes)
(Learning outcome examples from the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation at University of Toronto [opens in a new tab])
Teaching and Learning Activities
Teaching and learning activities can take so many different forms depending on your content, learners’ prior knowledge and skills, the level of your learners, the length of your classes, and more. When considering what teaching and learning activities you should use, keep in mind:
- How much teaching time you have each week for synchronous and asynchronous learning activities
- Your audience size (e.g., you may have more time for simulations and interactive sessions if you have a smaller audience)
- Your learner demographics
- What resources you have for your experience (e.g., if you are teaching a course for 200 students and don’t have TAs, then monitoring weekly discussion boards may not be feasible)
- Most importantly, your intended learning outcomes! (e.g., what skills and knowledge do you need them to leave with as they move on to other learning opportunities)
TIP #1: Keep it simple! Find a few teaching strategies and types of activities to use in your experience and keep these consistent throughout. Check out this short article on Selecting Instructional Strategies That Students Can Master [opens in a new tab] for more information.
Feedback and Assessment
Grades are meant to be a proxy of how much your students have actually learned, so consider this perspective when determining the assessments we will use for our course. We can’t test everything, so we have to take samples at different times and depths and use different methods in order to represent the entire scope of their learning. Your intended learning outcomes come into play here. What skills or knowledge do you need to ensure your learners have obtained by the time they finish your learning experience? We also need to consider the relative importance of these outcomes. If it’s absolutely crucial that a learner leaves with the ability to use a certain tool, then the assessment of their ability to do so should be weighted relatively higher.
There are many ways that you can assess your learners, and many of the assessments you would typically use while teaching in person can be adapted to an online environment. But this may be the time to rethink some of these assessments and move beyond traditional methods. Consider some of the examples below for ideas on types of assessments.
Types of Assessments
- Case analyses and/or reports
- Lab reports
- Live or recorded presentations, elevator pitches, 3-minute thesis
- Blog posts or newspaper articles
- Interviews (text, audio or video formats)
- Research essays or proposals
- Discussion posts
- Simulation performance and/or debrief report captured in video
- Quizzes/tests/exams
- Lecture participation
- Creating a wiki or instructional guide
- Marketing materials (e.g., ad mock-ups)
- Creative art pieces (e.g., visual art, multimedia, poetry, music, film, etc.)
- Statistical outputs, graphs, tables, charts
- Anything else that might be relevant for your learning experience!
TIP #2: What about my large class?
Assessments in large classes can seem overwhelming! Taking 20 minutes to grade one essay is no problem, until you have hundreds of students. One way around this is to leverage peer feedback! Students can provide each other with feedback, ideas, edits, and more – graded or ungraded. Click to read Tips from the Pros: Improve Student Learning with Peer Feedback [opens in a new tab]
How can this be applied to a course?
Designer’s Corner: Using Constructive Alignment
In the creation of this asynchronous online course, we generated a rough plan that abided by the Constructive Alignment process described above. Check out the video below for more details about how we approached this process!
Your turn: Start Generating a Course Plan!
All types of learners benefit from active participation in the learning process: even you! If possible, we recommend following along with this course with an online teaching and learning example of your own. With your example in mind, click on the Course Plan – Template link below to download a Word document template that you can fill in with your Learning Outcomes, Teaching Activities, and Assessment Methods: Course Plan – Template [download]. We recommend spending 20-30 minutes filling out the information that you have now, and revisiting the plan throughout this course to continue modifying and adding details.
—Click in the BOTTOM-RIGHT corner of the window above to view in fullscreen.
