Teaching Distracted Learners
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
It’s the holidays! Some of your learners will feel merry and bright; some will find these to be dark days. Almost everyone has something other than learning on their minds. As instructional designers and course creators, we know our learners want to succeed, even when they’re distracted. Let’s use some Brightspace tools to help our learners focus.
Release Conditions: Release Conditions are great for distracted learners and also for distracted course creators! Release Conditions allow course creators the flexibility of creating and posting their content on their own time and sharing it with learners at the most impactful moment. Review Brightspace’s Best practices for creating release conditions.
Intelligent Agents: Intelligent Agent messages can be sent to learners’ email addresses reminding them of the date of an exam or they can be triggered at each step of a multi-part assignment. They can automatically verify if a learner has not logged into a course in a certain number of days or viewed a specific content page. Intelligent Agents can also be used to motivate learners by sending encouraging messages (“only two more tasks to complete!”) to help them complete all tasks before the deadline. Learn how to Create an agent.
Awards: Brightspace’s Awards allow you to offer your learners certificates and badges. Badges are a fun way for learners to remain engaged in their courses. The criteria for earning a badge are varied, and many can be automated: posting a number of responses on a discussion board, submitting all assignments on time or early, achieving a perfect score on knowledge-check questions. If your course has grades, tying a small percentage of the grade to the achievement of a number of badges will help your learners keep their eyes on the prize. Learn more About awards.
Checklists: Checklists provide learners the chance to make sure they haven’t missed any important course components. They can also deliver a sense of satisfaction to your learners. When you know your learners will be distracted, a checklist is a particularly thoughtful tool to include. Checklists can also be provided in the form of a Quiz (“I completed my lab analysis, my report and my take-home exam. – True/False”). Learn how to Create a checklist.
Quiz settings: Speaking of quizzes, the Quiz settings can help focus your learners. Brightspace provides the opportunity to include a recommended time limit and the choice to “show clock”, so your learners know how much time they have remaining to finish their task. You can add Release Conditions to a Quiz. For example, learners could only be allowed access to a final assessment after they’d succeeded on a practice quiz. Finally, remember to provide any necessary Special Access for learners with accommodations, providing them additional time or attempts. And if you know you’ll be distracted at this time of year, set your own reminder with an Intelligent Agent! Learn how to Create and configure a Quiz.
By incorporating some or all of these Brightspace tools into your course, you will be helping your learners succeed during a very distracting time of year. Cheers to that!