Guide Students to Success with itslearning Guides
Do you remember learning how to tie your shoes?
Write?
Drive?
Type?
Or, as many of us currently find ourselves in quarantine-learning how to bake banana bread?
We learn tasks through being shown and by practice. Modeling, or demonstrating, is an essential teaching practice and crucial to learning. Teachers are masters in this particular area-throughout a lesson, we model tasks, vocabulary, how to complete an assignment, voice levels, and more. We read our audience, make a note of any struggles, and possibly model a specific task once more if our students are struggling.
As our learning environment has shifted online, we find ourselves in a different situation, at which point we cannot merely scan the room and read our students' faces to see if we need to model a step further. We may receive some questions from students over messenger or through video chat, but some of our students may be struggling with concepts, tools, and technologies without our knowledge. These struggles might be made more obvious if we notice students are struggling to complete tasks. If you find that few responses have been submitted for an assignment, perhaps it is an indicator that students need additional support to complete the assignment.
Providing students with self-help resources, such as screencasts, written, and pictorial guides can help support students as they learn online while we cannot physically be there to show students where to click and how to use a specific tool. While instructional guides for students may not magically boost all assignment scores, these small steps in supporting students create significant gains for learner independence and autonomy.
Write?
Drive?
Type?
Or, as many of us currently find ourselves in quarantine-learning how to bake banana bread?
We learn tasks through being shown and by practice. Modeling, or demonstrating, is an essential teaching practice and crucial to learning. Teachers are masters in this particular area-throughout a lesson, we model tasks, vocabulary, how to complete an assignment, voice levels, and more. We read our audience, make a note of any struggles, and possibly model a specific task once more if our students are struggling.
As our learning environment has shifted online, we find ourselves in a different situation, at which point we cannot merely scan the room and read our students' faces to see if we need to model a step further. We may receive some questions from students over messenger or through video chat, but some of our students may be struggling with concepts, tools, and technologies without our knowledge. These struggles might be made more obvious if we notice students are struggling to complete tasks. If you find that few responses have been submitted for an assignment, perhaps it is an indicator that students need additional support to complete the assignment.
Providing students with self-help resources, such as screencasts, written, and pictorial guides can help support students as they learn online while we cannot physically be there to show students where to click and how to use a specific tool. While instructional guides for students may not magically boost all assignment scores, these small steps in supporting students create significant gains for learner independence and autonomy.
What and Why:
An instructional guide for students can be a short document, pictures, or video showing students how to use a tool or feature within an online system, like itslearning. Helpful instructional guides for students could teach students how to add a Google Drive file to an itslearning assignment, how to record and add audio, or how to upload an image. Instructional guides help students become more successful, independent learners by providing learners with a library of self-help resources to answer questions as they arise.
As mentioned in an earlier post, while we may create fantastic, engaging virtual lessons for our students, but none of this matters if our students cannot find any of it. Similarly, just as it is vital to help our students quickly navigate to lessons, it is also essential to make sure students know how to use the technologies to help complete lesson objectives. We can provide our students with the option to add audio, video, images, or text as an answer to an assignment. However, if students do not understand how to use the technology behind these options, their options suddenly become much more limited. Just as we might demo how to use a tool in front of our class in a regular classroom setting, it is critical also to provide demonstrations in an online learning environment. By providing the scaffolding to help our students learn how to submit their work, our students can spend more time focusing on mastering the lesson goal. Our students will have the resources to select the option of their choice, rather than have the assignment choice already made for them. Plus, they'll be less likely to miss critical details like assignment requirements and due dates.
Boost Engagement
In terms of Universal Design for Learning, clear, easily accessible self-help guides can help boost engagement by minimizin distractions to learning, and providing students with the means to persist towards the lesson objective themselves. Furthermore, removing barriers to learning (such as confusion on how to add a link, audio file, etc.) can also help recruit more interest in the task at hand, as students have tools that empower them to complete the objective, rather than feel burdened by it.
Provides Supports for Representation
Providing students with instructional guides also helps provide multiple means of representation for learners and significantly reduces learning barriers. Written, video, and pictorial instructional guides grant learners with alternatives for visual information to ensure all learners have supports to successfully navigate the learning management system. Furthermore, providing instructional guides in multiple languages can also help support English Language Learners. By providing the resources in a format that is accessible anytime, anywhere, learners do not have to rely on the teacher to be online to answer questions, but have the tools to independently solve problems themselves.
Improves Action and Expression
Most obviously, providing students with instructional guides that show how to turn in an assignment can help ensure students actually turn in assignments. Each time a student pauses within a lesson to ask questions such as "where do I click" or "how do I add audio", the student burdens their cognitive load. When we surpass our cognitive load, we cannot take in any new information, grow frustrated, and may abandon the task at hand. If we provide our learners with additional supports to prevent these pauses that weigh down their cognitive load, we can ensure our learners can focus on the true task at hand.
In addition, providing guides for students also improves action and expression by removing barriers for communication and expression. If we show students how to use audio and video features within itslearning, for example, students now have these options available to them each time they sign in to the platform.
How:
Adding instructional guides and videos for learners into your itslearning courses can be accomplished in a number of ways:
- Create an "eLearning Help" folder within your course.
- Add all of the instructional guides into the folder and make sure the folder is active plus easy to locate within your course. Add a link to the folder to an announcement, within a content block on a page, or within daily lessons.
- Create a content block on your course start page.
- Link all of the instructional guides pertinent to the lesson in the content block for easy access throughout the lesson.
- Do whatever works best for you!
Check out the guides below and easily add them to your courses by copying the link or by making your own copy. To create your own instructional videos like those shown, add the free extension "Screencastify" to your Google Chrome browser and follow the steps here for premium, unlimited recording access.
- How to Add Audio on itslearning
- How to Add Video on itslearning
- How to Upload/Insert Images on itslearning (via web or mobile phone app)
- How to Post in a Discussion on itslearning
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CAST, "UDL: Universal Design for Learning Guidelines", The UDL Guidelines (website), accessed April 11, 2020.
http://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Danny Halarewich, "Reducing Cognitive Overload for a Better User Experience", Smashing Magazine (website), accessed April 20, 2020.
CAST, "UDL: Universal Design for Learning Guidelines", The UDL Guidelines (website), accessed April 11, 2020.
http://udlguidelines.cast.org/
http://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Danny Halarewich, "Reducing Cognitive Overload for a Better User Experience", Smashing Magazine (website), accessed April 20, 2020.
CAST, "UDL: Universal Design for Learning Guidelines", The UDL Guidelines (website), accessed April 11, 2020.
http://udlguidelines.cast.org/
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