Page 136 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

8.2 Learning Activity Design 127
learner and an environment (optionally involving other learners, practitioners,
resources, tools, and services) to achieve a planned learning outcome (Beetham,
2004). It can be defined as specific interactions of learners with other people, using
specific tools and resources, oriented toward specific outcomes.
The teacher’s essential task is to get students to engage in learning activities that
are likely to result in achieving outcomes (Shuell, 1986). What the student does is
more important than what the teacher does. Each learning activity in the course
should be intentional, meaningful, and useful.
From the perspective of a teacher or designer, a complete learning activity
consists of the following components: learning objectives, activities or tasks,
learning methods and operational procedures, organizational forms, ways of
interaction, forms of learning outcomes, activity monitoring rules, formative
feedback, roles and responsibilities, learning evaluation rules, and evaluation cri-
teria. Learning activities should include three essential elements: learning tasks,
learning methods, and evaluation requirements (Huang, Kinshuk, & Spector, 2013).
From the perspective of learners, each learning activity includes four aspects:
learning tasks, learning resources, evaluation methods, and learning support
services.

• Learning tasks require a clear description of the learning outcomes so that the
learners can explicitly understand what they should do in the associated activity.
• Learning resources include both non-digital and digital materials providing the
learner with the necessary information and content, for example, textbooks,
study guides, journal articles and reading packets, video clips, and online
resources. The basic principle of preparing learning resources is that they should
be adequate and appropriate to complete the learning tasks with the result of
reducing redundant resources.
• Evaluation methods should adequately examine the completion of learning
activities without focusing on the assessment of learners’ memorization of the
learning contents.
• Learning support services are extremely important, so the instructors or tutors
have to understand the learning difficulties and learning environment of the
learners so as to facilitate effective communication with them.

There should not be too many learning activities in a unit of instruction so as to
minimize the extraneous cognitive burden placed on the learners. Learning objec-
tives, student’s acceptance of the activity considering their cognitive load, and the
various resources provided for the activity are critical points of learning activity
design. The learning objective is the starting point, and also the destination of
learning activity design, while learner characteristics and resource conditions are
constraints. To design learning activity better, we need to focus on some theories
related to these points, such as Bloom’s taxonomy, Sweller’s cognitive load theory,
and Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning.