Samita Nayak
Creating lessons online may look like the easiest job on the planet but it isn’t. As online learning became the new norm in the wake of the pandemic, teachers were compelled to learn instructional design. Technology can be a great help unless you get it wrong, and getting it right is the biggest challenge.
While creating online learning content, many teachers replicate the classroom learning style. However, that is nothing but a cheap imitation. You need to understand that in-person teaching isn’t the same as online teaching. Thus, implementing the same strategy won’t be successful. Here are some best tips to create a good online learning experience.
Take Notice of Cognitive Load
Cognitive load is one of the things you must take notice of while creating online content. Too much cognitive load can result in a drop in understanding and retaining information. So, teachers need to design digital lessons in a way that doesn’t possess an unnecessary cognitive load.
You can do a few things to ensure it, such as
- Designing online courses with consistency
- Keeping the navigation simple, consistent, and intuitive
- Using common colors and fonts so that students put less effort into getting adjusted to a new lesson
- Putting too much information on one page. It will be difficult for students to process it all
- Removing unnecessary information if any content on the page isn’t supporting the drive to learn
- Not leaving negative space on each page
Introduce Interactive Capabilities
Simply moving your offline worksheet online won’t work. Try taking a step further and include interactive options.
To create interactive opportunities, try adding a student-to-student interaction, a student-to-teacher interaction, and a student-to-content interaction to the worksheet.
Learning is a social act. So, the more opportunities you find for students to collaborate and connect with each other, the better they will be at learning.
Additionally, teachers must actively participate in class discussions and activities. They should also provide timely feedback to students on assessments. This way you can create an active learning experience that promotes engagement among students and isn’t isolating.
Build Formative Assessments
While creating online learning content, teachers often create lessons similar to how they would do for classroom learning. For example, it can either be taking quizzes, completing courses, working on projects, testing, and so on. This would give them a pretty good idea about how well a student is performing.
However, doing the same thing may not work for online learning. In that case, the best thing to do is offer short and quick assessments throughout the lesson. This would help them determine how well a student has understood the lesson.
