Designing Your Course

Active Learning Strategy Examples

Some of our best online courses involve a live synchronous component either in lieu of or in addition to pre-recorded video lectures. As opposed to merely being another avenue for a standard lecture, these live webinars are built around interactivity and engagement with the learners. The samples below demonstrate some rich activities that, with a little planning and setup, can foster solid discussions and memorable learning experiences using our Zoom LTI.

Ice-Breaker/Getting to Know You Activities

Peer Interview

At the beginning of her class every quarter, in the first webinar session, instructor Kris Miller runs a dyadic activity whereby learners interview each other in pairs (using the Breakout Room function in Zoom), and then each person is asked to introduce each other to the rest of the class. It's a classic ice-breaker activity common to in-person courses that works very well in an online environment.

What I Hope to Learn

Towards the end of her first webinar session every quarter, Kris Miller also runs one final activity where the learners are asked to indicate what they're hoping to get out of the class and learn from the class over the quarter. Kris sets up a public Google Doc that students are encouraged to share their course expectations, hopes, and big questions with one another live. Kris then does an excellent job of facilitating a brief discussion around how she's planning to address those topics. This collaborative document can also be created using Canvas, please ask your Instructional Designer for more information.

Brainstorming/Planning Activities

Success Criteria

In her Business Analysis class, instructor Joye Beachum involves her students in a brainstorming activity about the success criteria to the course business problem upon which students spend much of the quarter working. Instead of relying on the students to work on a shared Google Doc in small groups, which is another option, she goes into the editing mode of her PowerPoint presentation, and elicits ideas from her learners as she prompts and takes notes that she later shares with the class through the LMS.

Elicitation Plan Brainstorming

A large portion of instructor Tanima Pattani's course focuses on elicitation. As such, Tanima has the learners brainstorm an elicitation plan in small groups using a template that the instructor has provided. They then are asked to present their work to the rest of the class, including sharing their screens (Zoom allows any participant to share their screen). They get some feedback from the instructor and each other, and then they use their work for the basis of a larger class assignment.

Case Study Activities

Procurement Breach Event

Instructor Vickie Cleary, from the Project Management program, is an expert at coming up with realistic case studies for her students to work on during class, as she's designed one for each of her webinar sessions. In this example, learners are asked to review a procurement breach event with some of their peers and then present their findings to the rest of the class, where a large group discussion takes place. As with many small group activities in webinars, this activity makes good use of the breakout room functionality to achieve its aims.

Procurement Scenario

In another case study she designed, instructor Vickie Cleary presents several types of contracts to different small groups. The students are asked to think critically together to determine what type of procurement contracts theirs is an example of, the rationale for their determination, and whether the risk is taken upon by them, their supplier, or both. She set up the case studies in a public Google Doc, and asked each group to pick a spokesperson to lead a discussion of their particular scenario when sharing with the class.

Group Discussion Activities

Why Use Words Activity

In this fun activity/game designed by instructor Kris Miller, she displays several examples of modern texting communication with both emojis and text message/internet slang such as "ROFL," and asks her learners to guess the meanings, which results in a great discussion. The point of the activity is to understand how communication and understanding your clients and their various frameworks (including jargon) is key in being able to provide the best services.

Conflict Management Scenario Sharing

In this example, instructor Joye Beachum models and facilitates a discussion with a small group of webinar attendees around conflict management. This is a pretty standard and easy type of activity to do as a large group in a webinar - asking students to share their own experiences in order to learn from one another.

Role Playing Activities

Donor Interview

Although our Fundraising online courses primarily are examples of our more traditional online courses, with a focus on pre-recorded lectures, some of the fundraising courses include a webinar or two during the quarter, including this example which shows a good role-playing activity. The instructor brought in a guest colleague to act out a donor visit. Then, the students paired up in Zoom breakout rooms and were asked to come up with scenarios where each person got to play the part of the donor and development officer. As they were practicing with one another, the instructor and her guest visited each of the rooms throughout the 30-minute activity to listen in and provide some commentary. This example includes the presented instructions, the instructor and her colleague modeling the interview, and the tail end of one example of the students working with one another with some instructor commentary.

Interactive eLearning Activities

Top Notch Irrigation Business Profit Simulation

This is an example assignment created by one of CPE's talented instructional designers. The assignment presents a business case scenario, asks students to strategically think how to maximize profits by trying out different numbers in an interactive tool, evaluating the results to come up with a workable solution, and then write a short paragraph describing their findings.

Spanish Vocabulary Activities

Robert Blake, Ph.D. has explored the use of computer-aided language learning for decades. He worked with instructional designers to create this interactive lesson that features drag/drop activities with sound, interactive video, questions, fill-in-the-blank exercises and more to help students practice and learn some basic Spanish vocabulary. This is just one of 15 such lessons that were created.

Discussion Board Activities

The Blind Man and the Elephant

This discussion board post does an excellent job of referring learners to a piece of media (in this case a video) and then asking some key opinion questions about it in order to promote and elicit some critical thinking on the week's topic. Canvas allows an instructor to easily embed videos for such an activity.

Imagine Being Sequestered

The instructor in this project management class decided to use a discussion board question to explore the concept of sequestration by asking the learners to imagine themselves in the situation. Instead of merely asking students to define the concept, this allows students to think critically about what it would be like to not talk to anyone about some protected topics from work, which allows the students to internalize the concept more. The student postings are always really interesting for this question.