Most instructors introduce course content by posting texts and pre-recorded lectures on GauchoSpace. However, as informative as an hour-long video lecture or a PDF of a seminal book chapter may be, this content is not always easily-accessible or engaging to students. Also, the static nature of the materials can result in them being too advanced for some students and, at the same time, too easy for others -- leading to either frustration or boredom. To maximize pedagogical effectiveness, course content should be dynamic: It needs to be well-tailored to the class on the whole, and it needs to appeal to the modern attention span, giving students frequent opportunities to interact with it in a meaningful way.
GauchoSpace’s “lesson” activity allows you to present content adaptively, by skipping or repeating content for students on an individual basis or by selectively introducing remedial or alternative content, according to their learning needs and goals. The lesson helps instructors curate a path along which students interact with a series of learning materials, answering a short question between each. The answer the student gives to the question will determine if he/she can continue, or even to which materials he/she is presented next. The learning path can be as simple or as complex as the instructor sees fit -- from a straight line to a multi-branching system.
Check out a demonstration lesson:
Reviewing these basic concepts will help you understand this article:
Activities:
Activities are added by instructors for students to submit materials and interact with the instructor or other students. Some examples include Assignments, Quizzes, and Forums. Certain Activities can be graded within GauchoSpace and are automatically populated in the Gradebook.
Formative Assessment:
Formative assessment refers to a loosely-defined variety of assessments of which the primary focus is boosting student attainment. These types of "check-your-knowledge" assessments typically aim to provide maximum constructive feedback to a student and does not carry much weight in a student's final grade.
Formative assessment is typically contrasted against summative assessment, which refers to assessment practices that focus on filtering student groups based upon proficiency or achievement. While summative assessments may incorporate useful feedback to students, their primary purpose is to determine the extent to which a student has demonstrated content mastery for the purposes of external accountability. "High-stakes" exams are examples of summative assessment.
See also: Formative Assessment (Wikipedia)
[CONCEPT 3]: A group is a collection of users in a GauchoSpace course site. Users can belong to multiple groups. Some groups are created automatically in GauchoSpace (such as for discussion sections or labs that are registered under a parent course), whereas other groups can be created manually. Instructors and Editing TAs can create/manage groups from the Participants page.
[CONCEPT 4]: A group is a collection of users in a GauchoSpace course site. Users can belong to multiple groups. Some groups are created automatically in GauchoSpace (such as for discussion sections or labs that are registered under a parent course), whereas other groups can be created manually. Instructors and Editing TAs can create/manage groups from the Participants page.
[CONCEPT 5]: A group is a collection of users in a GauchoSpace course site. Users can belong to multiple groups. Some groups are created automatically in GauchoSpace (such as for discussion sections or labs that are registered under a parent course), whereas other groups can be created manually. Instructors and Editing TAs can create/manage groups from the Participants page.
Here are some good reasons for using a lesson:
Boost engagement: The brain is best at processing information in manageable chunks. Taking periodic breaks while reading long texts or watching/listening to lectures to actively reflect on presented content is more likely to result in higher learner engagement and retention.
Check for understanding: Incorporating "check your knowledge" breaks, directs students towards gaps in their understanding. This type of formative assessment encourages students to demonstrate grasp of key prerequisite concepts before they are allowed to build upon them.
Build foundations: It's important to take steps to ensure that your students are all starting on the same page, especially in intermediate/advanced level topics that assume familiarity with a common set of basic concepts. Many students could benefit from a "refresher" after month-long vacation break after an introductory course. Other students may be taking your course out of sequence or returning to the material after taking the introductory course the previous year. The lesson activity can scaffold these review materials for students at the beginning of the quarter -- re-familiarizing those who need it, while allowing those who are comfortable to skip to the main course content.
Promote student choice: Extending the freedom of choice to your students can boost student engagement and agency. While the core content of a course must be the same for all students, you may consider incorporating a selection of elective content from which a student can choose a topic to learn more about. Students have enrolled your course for different reasons and, therefore, are likely to be interested in different topics. You could also employ this strategy later in the quarter to give students an idea of the different directions that the field can take them after the course is over. Another option is to let students interact with a given week's content topics in the order of their choice.
Reduce clutter: Consolidating multiple course content into a single, curated activity can help keep your course page tidy. Collecting too many materials on the main page increases the risk of students may accidentally skip over important material.
Identify and collect all of the relevant course materials with which you would like your students to potentially interact. If possible, try to incorporate a variety of mediums. Materials that you can incorporate include anything that can be embedded with the GauchoSpace’s ATTO text editor: text, images, audio/video recordings, slideshow presentations, embedded media/iframes from external websites… and more!
Decide the order in which course materials should be presented. Also, determine whether access to certain materials should be restricted based on the answers to certain questions. For example, you may want to prevent students from viewing certain content until they have demonstrated a certain degree of proficiency with prerequisite materials. Alternatively, incorrect answers could direct students to remedial, ”catch up” materials. Integrating questions with branching behavior in this way can also help you guide students to optional content for students who are:
- Preparing for a related, up-coming advanced-level course
- Enrolled in an honors or graduate section of the course
- Earning extra credit
- Interested in learning more just for fun
Do you want questions to redirect students to previously presented materials?
Do you want questions to direct students to remedial / "catch-up" materials?
Do you want questions to redirect students to scafflolding materials that are not necessary for proficient/advanced students?
Do you want questions to direct learners to "bonus" materials?
Or you can be creative by combining any or all or these strategies!
Once the outline of your lesson is complete, you can start to build it out in GauchoSpace. Creating the activity shell through which students will access the lesson is simple:
Now, add your content pages to the lesson shell:
1. On the main page of the lesson, make sure you are in the “edit” tab:
2. If no pages have been added already, click add new content page in the menu shown:
If one or more pages have been already added, click “add new content page” in one of the drop-down menus in the “actions” column:
3. Enter a name of the content page and add the appropriate page content in the editor window. You can add multimedia content to the page using the media buttons in the editor:
4. At the bottom of the page, under “Content 1”, make a placeholder label (i.e. “???”) that will be easy to identify and change later.
In the “Jump” drop-down menu, select “This page”. This will be changed later when all of the appropriate content and/or question pages are incorporated.
5. Click “Save page”:
You will see that the new content is now visible in the main lesson page. For better visibility of multiple pages, make sure your edit view is set to “collapsed”.
You can author questions directly in the lesson or import them from the question bank:
To author the questions directly:
1. On the main page of the lesson, make sure you are in the “edit” tab:
2. If no pages have been added already, click add new question page in the menu shown:
If one or more pages have been already added, click “add new question page” in one of the drop-down menus in the “actions” column:
3. Enter a name of the question page and add the appropriate prompt, answers, and feedback in the editor window. You can add multimedia content to the page using the media buttons in the editor:
4. At the bottom of the page, under “Content 1”, make a placeholder label (i.e. “???”) that will be easy to identify and change later.
5. In the “Jump” drop-down menu, select “This page”. This will be changed later when all of the appropriate content and/or question pages are incorporated:
6. Click “Save page”:
To import questions from the question bank:
1. Export the question from the question bank [add link] onto your computer.
2. Inside the lesson, enter “edit” view and select “expanded” view:
3. Click on the “Import question” link between the pages where questions should be inserted:
4. Select the file type of the exported question bank file. Use the browse function to find the file on your computer.
5. Import the selected file.
You will see that the new content is now visible in the main lesson page. For better visibility of multiple pages, make sure your edit view is set to “collapsed”.
Once all content and question pages have been created, you can go back to link them together! For each page:
1. Open the page from the “edit” tab by clicking on the “gear” icon for the appropriate page:
2. For “content” pages, you will define the navigation buttons that will appear that the bottom of the page:
- In the “Content” sections (“Content 1”, “Content 2”, etc.), put the name that will appear on each button in the “Description” field.
- In the “Jump” drop-down menu, specify the page to which you would like each button to link.
For “question” pages, you will define the navigation behaviour that corresponds to each response possibility:
- In the “Jump” drop-down menu for each option, specify the page to which you would like each response to link.
You will see that the new content is now visible in the main lesson page. For better visibility of multiple pages, make sure your edit view is set to “collapsed”.
You can add custom features to your lesson if you like. These settings can, for example, allow students to navigate to a specific point in the lesson, or in linear lesson designs, give students an idea of their progress through the lesson.
1. Test out your lesson by clicking “preview”:
2. Select “edit settings” in the “Lesson Administration” menu
3. You can specify additional settings in the “Appearance” and “Flow Control” menus:
Preview your lesson again to test the new settings!
Many students may not be familiar with the lesson activity, therefore it may be a good idea to introduce the workflow to them:
- If your lesson is designed to loop students back to certain content multiple times, you may want to explain that this is normal behavior in the lesson.
- If your lesson incorporates question pages, you may want to specify how these questions will be graded.
- You will want to test the lesson yourself using the "Preview" option, before introducing it to students. This way, you can be confident students will not run into frustrating broken "jump" links!
Check out a demonstration lesson!
This lesson follows this outline:
This video provides an explanation and walk-through of the Lesson activity:
If you are interested other tools for content curation or formative assessment you might be interested in:
Activity completion: Curate course materials
With the “Activity completion” feature, instructors can specify how students must interact with a given activity in order for it to be marked as “completed”. This helps encourage students to have contact with all of the necessary course material. The “completion status” of activities may also be used to restrict student access to subsequent course content. This can be used to ensure that students interact with course materials in a particular order.
The completion progress block allows students and instructors to visualize all completed, upcoming, and incomplete work in one simple interface:
Quiz: Incorporate simple formative assessment
While the lesson provides instructors with a robust platform for formative assessment, the Quiz activity can also be used to present content while incorporating “check-your-knowledge” questions. The advantage of using a quiz activity is that it is quicker to set up than a lesson because page “jumps” do not need to be defined. Quizzes, however, cannot adaptively present new content based on student responses. Also, students are generally used to quizzes being used for high-stakes summative assessment, rather than for presenting/reviewing content.
- For more information about the lesson activity, check out the official Moodle documentation!
- If you do not want your lesson to be graded, make sure that each question is set to be scored out of zero points.
- If you want to provide students with random questions, you can introduce a "cluster" of question pages. You can find more information here.
- If using the "progress bar" feature with a branching design, a student may not see the lesson as 100% completed upon reaching the end. This is because the progress bar takes all lesson pages into account.
- Make sure to test your lesson thoroughly before launching to make sure that all of the page "jump" links point to the correct targets!
- Essay-type questions can be incorporated into the question pages, but must be manually graded by an instructor. See the official Moodle documentation for more details.