Explore

The Explore phase of the activity provides opportunities for learners to dig into the topic, concept, or theme. As always, you will consider learners’ different preferences and accommodations. Where possible, with assistance from your helpful Librarians, providing material in multiple formats is a wonderful boost for learning. With the amount of information generated these days, it’s not difficult to find text, audio, and visual resources to cover all content and concepts! This is a big boost to ensuring Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles are in place and learners’ opportunities are maximized.

The Explore phase is traditionally the information formerly provided by the Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the form of PowerPoints and | or lecture notes. Given this information tends to be mined from the fee-based resource assigned for the course, it will likely take some time and talent to curate or create alternate, open resources. Luckily, the Open Access movement has freed much more information into the open. With the Tri-Agency having made open dissemination a requirement for funding, higher quality, often peer-reviewed, academic research is easier to access and share.

Considerations

Feel free to verify CBC News’s report on the research that sparked generation of the above headline using free ed tech:

CBC News. (2015, May 17). Canadians’ attention span worse than the average goldfish. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadians-attention-span-worse-than-the-average-goldfish-1.3077646

Even if you don’t subscribe to circumstances being as dire as the above suggests, it’s a good plan to avoid pages and pages of text with little to no variation. Luckily, harnessing some basic technology to inject interest and activity into what would otherwise be pages of text washing over your learners is easily facilitated. A healthy balance of READ + WATCH + LISTEN + DO will engage your learners, allow you to express more of your creativity, and use ed tech tools to their full potential.

Just as you may restate concepts multiple ways to solidify understanding in your structured class time, presenting “textbook” information in multiple ways, using multi(ple) media assists when learning more independently.