Online Teaching - Make the Implicit Explicit
When writing or giving instructions to students to carry out activities in online courses, it can have a very positive impact on their motivation to carry out the tasks if you make the rationale you have for them to carry out the tasks clear to them. Very often, when writing instructions, we focus on what we want the students to do, but not why we want them to do it. We know that we have chosen this particular set of activities in this sequence because it will better enable their learning; we know implicitly that it will be for their benefit. So, why not make your implicit rationale explicit to your students?
Why should students do an activity?
As teachers, and as subject matter experts, we put together learning activities in a sequence in order to create a learner journey. In one week, we want students to gain knowledge and practice skills because the things they do this week are part of a coherent whole – the whole module, made up of a complete set of activities that, if carried out, will enable them to be successful in achieving the learning outcomes and passing the assessment.
When writing or giving instructions consider:
Why are you asking them to do this now?
How does it connect to what has gone before?
How does it relate to what is coming later?
How does it prepare them for their assessment?
Why do you think it is a great idea to complete this activity?
Building Motivation
If you put yourself in your students’ place and consider how they may feel if they are faced with a list of time-consuming activities, it’s easy to understand why they might ask ‘Why should I do these things?’, ‘Why should I take the time and effort to participate in this discussion?’, ‘How does it benefit me to give up my time to carry out these practice activities?’. We can’t assume that our students know the reasons for doing the activities.
If we can answer for students the question of ‘why should I do this?’, we can give them a reason to carry out the task and have a positive impact on their motivation to do so. Further, the process of making explicit our rationale, may also help students to see the connections between the various elements of the syllabus and be better able to follow the threads of the module.
I’m grateful to Wenhao Fu who pointed out to me the similarity between this way of building motivation for our students and Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle model as it is used in marketing, and the idea that in creating a business’s value proposition to its customers, they should start with ‘why’.
How to give the rationale
It’s not too difficult to get into the habit in your live classrooms of adding a little verbal explanation of why you are asking them to do an activity, and how it connects to what has gone before and comes after. However, this is ephemeral. You may provide a recording of the session, but that could require your students to scroll back through the recording to get the appropriate set of instructions.
It is a great idea to make a record in the VLE (that’s the LMS to our American cousins) of the instructions for the activities for each week – this way you can convert your VLE pages from a repository of resources for the module to a powerful learning tool that provides the instruction and rationale for all of the things the students will do in order to complete the module successfully. You also have the advantage that once you have built out your module once, and written up the what and why of all the learning activities, that the VLE pages can be saved and duplicated for future runs of the same or similar modules.