Structured materials support engagement
It is important to remember that students need a scaffolded learning journey. It is the role of the educator to structure learning through careful curriculum design and the curation of materials and activities. Your online space should create a narrative pathway through a student’s learning journey.
Structure is important for a number of reasons:
- Communication: A well-structured learning environment ensures key information is easily visible for students, supporting communication of key messages.
- Signposting: structured materials signpost students as to the educator’s expectations in a given class, topic, or section.
- Accessibility: structuring content into learning chunks helps to make content accessible and easy to find for all students.
How to structure your online environment
As the module leader, you can scaffold students learning experience by taking simple steps to:
Structure into weeks or topics. Students should be able to find information quickly and easily. Your online space should be structured into weeks or topics to help students easily navigate to the information they need at a particular point.
Create a narrative journey. Your content should be structured to create a narrative that leads learners through the content. Narratives can be focused around particular challenges, or could be based around particular case studies referred to throughout the module. Where possible, you should link back to prior content covered to demonstrate links between knowledge and understanding.
Add context to materials and activities. Signposting expectations is important both in the classroom and in an online environment. Each piece of materials or activity should have an associated description explaining expectations (time etc.).
Make use of multimedia learning objects. Think of the online space as an extension to the physical classroom. Learning should be broken up into small bite-sized chunks of content. These learning chunks should vary and should include elements of reading, watching, listening and discussion where possible. Varying your online materials supports engagement and has the added bonus of catering for different learning styles.
A clear outline of the learning journey can help students navigate the online learning environment.
For this exercise, take a look at your module and develop a list of topic headings. These headings should be short and descriptive to help signpost learning.
- Create a heading for each week
- Add a short description at the top of each weekly block
