Laura Creates Courses

There are many community-building benefits of holding live online meetings in your course. Learn how to make the most of these sessions.

Links mentioned in the episode:

Reflection is making meaning of our experiences. It allows students to review their understanding, make connections, and draw conclusions about what they learned and how it applies to them. That’s big stuff. 

In this episode, we look at ways to bring reflection into an online course. 

The activity for this episode is to brainstorm five reflection questions that you might insert into your course. The first three are going to be the hardest to come up with but you should be able to flow after that. Feel free to brainstorm more than five. 

Generating your own answers to questions is much more powerful than selecting an answer from a list. It engages your brain differently. Take advantage of how the brain works.  This episode gives some examples of how use this design strategy in your online course.

The activity for this episode is to think about your course. If you already have a course and have a multiple-choice question in it, re-work it so that students generate their own answer rather than choosing one of your options. If you don’t yet have a course developed, think about a topic you are going to cover and write three potential questions that you could use to help students generate their own answers from the learning.

Then share one open-ended question in the comments. Be sure to give us context for the question. That will help us give the right feedback. Please read and respond to other comments as you see a need. I look forward to reading your responses. 

Microlearning is breaking larger topics into very small chunks, maybe a 2-3-minute video, an infographic, or a page of text. Personalization is when learners are able to move through the material as they see fit. The two together are powerful partners in learning.

The activity for this episode is to think about a specific topic in your course. How small can you break down the pieces of that content? Break your topic down into the smallest possible pieces and label how you might best convey that piece. Will you use a video, an infographic, etc?

In the comments below, let us know whether microlearning might work for some or all of your content. Join the conversation by responding to other comments.

People have preferred ways of learning. As a course creator, you need to understand the learning preferences and how to leverage them.   

This episode explores how you can design to meet your learners preferences and why you should.   

The activity for this episode is to think about something you plan to teach in your course. How would you provide the information to your visual learners? Your auditory learners? And your tactile learners?  

Adult learners are very different than K-12 learners. Our lives are full of more responsibility than most of us imagined we would have. That's why we have to look at adult learners differently than younger learners.

This episode explores the seven adult learning principles and how you can address them in your online course creation. In no particular order:

• Adults must want to learn
• Adults will learn only what they feel they need to learn
• Adult learning focuses on problem-solving
• Adults learn by doing
• Experience affects adult learning
• Adults learn best in an informal situation
• Adults want guidance and consideration as equal partners in the process
  

Spaced learning is a learning strategy that takes advantage of how the brain works. As a course designer, you can take advantage of spaced learning to help your students retain what they learned.   

Can blogging create community in an online course? The short answer is yes, if you design it that way. This episode looks at ways to use blogging in an online course as both a learning activity and a way to build community between your students.

The activity for this episode is to brainstorm as many blogging activities or topics you can think of for your online course. Can you hit 50? They are not all going to be good, but there will be some gems in there if you dig deep.

Choose one of your activity ideas and post it in the comments with a brief explanation of why you chose it. Be sure to read and contribute to the conversation!

Discussion board challenges are regular activities that help move the learning forward, allow students to practice, and develop community support. That's a lot of wins for one learning activity.   

The activity for this episode is to come up with three challenges you might use in your course. You will need to include what the students will be practicing for each challenge. And you also need to decide what feedback is most likely to be needed in this challenge.   

Next, choose one of those challenges and post it in the comments of the Ep 5 YouTube video. Browse through the comments to see what others wrote. Ask questions, provide feedback, or offer kudos. Join the community conversation.

Using open-ended questions on discussion board can give you insights into student thinking. The trick is to ask the right questions to get what you need as the instructor.

The activity for this episode is to write two open-ended discussion board questions that you might use in a course you are creating or hope to create. It can be a multi-part question.

Discussion boards are the heavy lifters of community building in an online course. This episode focuses on introductions and is the first in a three-episode series on using discussion boards effectively in an online course.

The more we know about how people learn and how the brain works, the more we can leverage learning activities to make the learning stick. This episode gives an overview of what learning activities are and how they are important to learning. 

In this episode we talk about the difference between course goals, the objectives that help you achieve the course goal, and the specific learning outcomes that make up each objective.  This is effectively outlining your course. 

Who is Laura and what does she now about creating online courses? This trailer answers those questions and invites you to subscribe and learn.