Teaching Online:

Tasks and assignments.

Online Teaching Series

• Overview of my approach to online teaching

• Structuring and curating

• Learning through discussion

• Tasks and assignments

• FAQs

• Resources

• Webinar

• Webinar - Grad Student Edition

• Webinar Series - Examples and Tips

Disclaimer Haiku

This is what I’ve done
It won’t work for everyone
The students like it.

Learning Tasks and Assignments

In my teaching I distinguish between tasks and assignments:

• tasks are learning activities that help students become familiar with course content;

• assignments are more involved learning activities where students demonstrate their ability to work with the course material.

My online courses have one learning task (participation in the discussion forums) and two assignments (module reviews and the MyModule course project). These are weighted approximately equally (ie roughly one-third of the course grade each).

Task: Discussions

Each content item is embedded in a discussion forum, and each discussion forum has a discussion prompt known as a Discussion Task. Students are expected to participate regularly in discussions. A good faith effort counts more than accuracy. Since there are so many forums in the course (between 40 and 60), the grading of posts is done in a global manner using a simple two-point (good - poor) or three-point (good - satisfactory - poor) system. The discussions are intended as a space for the students to learn and study in, therefore I don’t want them to see it as a hurdle. At the same time, though, I know that some students need the marks to motivate them to participate.

Assignment: Module Reviews

Every module has a Module Review, a short (500-700 words) essay that pertains to the module topic. These are graded according to normal essay grading practices. I use a variety of prompts for review:

• a general question on the topic;

• a specific question on a particular aspect of the topic;

• a question relating to something that has come up in the discussion forums;

• a free-form essay where students conceive of a question or issue they want to treat in essay format.

• provide a new reading/viewing and ask students to relate it back to the module’s topic and/or content items.

I generally ask students to complete five or six of the eight module reviews.

Assignment: MyModule

The approach taken in my courses is not what students have come to expect in online courses. For that reason, I want them to reflect on how the course structures their learning. By doing a term-long, scaffolded project where they create their own module, they reflect on how the learn in the course and use that reflection to guide the creation of their module. Students have generally responded quite well to the idea of MyModule; as in all things educational, the quality of the execution varies. My courses are general education courses, so I attract students from different programs and year of study, and the variety of MyModule quality reflects that.

MyModule is scaffolded into three parts:

• Checkpoint 1: students analyze a module from the course in order to understand its underlying structure;

• Checkpoint 2: students present an outline of their own project including a couple of content items (to make sure they’re on the right track);

• MyModule: the final project, due at the end of term.

Unfortunately learning management systems (LMSs) haven’t clued in to the idea that they need to provide students with their own development spaces where they can create projects, so I give students some leeway here in what the final form will be: a PDF, a website, or another app (e.g. Wakelet, Padlet, or Milanote).

What? No tests? No exams?

No, I don’t assign any tests or exams. But this approach is flexible enough to allow you to do so if you so wish.