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You are now at the point in the design process where you can begin to design the learning activities that you’d like to include in your course. As you do so, please keep in mind the following key characteristics of effective learning activities.

Key Characteristic #1: A Time Estimate for All Activities

You should have a time estimate for each learning activity and assessment in your course. Accurate time estimates ensure sufficient rigor and keep you from asking students to do an unreasonable amount of work for the credits they are earning. The total amount of time students that should spend on coursework each week is defined by Boise State University policy #4080. This policy states that for a 15-week course, students should spend three “Clock Hours” per week per credit. For a three-credit course, this would mean 7.5 to 9.0 hours of instruction every week. By making these time estimates for your learning activities, you can be confident that your course meets the requirements of university policy #4080, which in turn will ensure your course is in compliance with the Northwest Commission on College and Universities’ Policy on Credit Hour (which is required for accreditation), Idaho State Board of Education policy, and U.S. Department of Education policy. Consequently, estimating the time it takes a student to complete a learning activity is one of the most important things that you will do as you plan this course!

Besides helping you meet university policy and accreditation requirements, these time estimates provide additional benefits to you. Most importantly, they will reduce the amount of work it takes to design and develop your course. This is because the time estimates make it much easier to write directions for the learning activities. There is something very powerful that happens when you reflect on how much time your students will need to devote to the assigned work. You conduct small, rapid “mind experiments” or mental simulations in which you imagine the students doing the work. This makes it easier for you to see the relationships between the learning activities, and it helps you formulate instructional strategies that will allow the students to carry out the activities. As a result, the course design takes shape much more quickly and there tend to be fewer revisions to the design later on.

Time estimates help students to evaluate the daily and weekly time requirements for completing your course, plan a learning schedule in consideration of other responsibilities, and develop a routine for study and assignment completion.

It’s particularly important to get an accurate estimate of the average reading time to help students plan their study schedules. Faculty often overestimate student reading speed, so you want to put some real effort into calculating this. A good rule of thumb is 3-5 minutes per page. If you want help in conducting a thorough estimate of reading times or creating a strategy to help students deal with lengthy readings more efficiently, please talk to your Instructional Design Consultant.

Rice University provides a helpful Course Workload Estimator followed by information used to develop calculation results. Rochester Institute of Technology gives more general suggestions for determining how much time your students will need to process the content and participate in activities/assessments in an article titled, Time and Tasks in Online Learning.

Key Characteristic #2: Due Dates That Encourage Spaced Study and Practice

Research on teaching and learning has proven that for long-term retention and application of knowledge and skills, spaced study and practice is far superior to massed study and practice, also known as “cramming.” The trick for the design of an online course is to figure out how to promote spaced study and practice while maintaining the scheduling flexibility that students expect in an online course. We suggest that you try to provide students with a 2-3 day window of opportunity in which to submit their work. To do this, you may split up the week into three periods (e.g., Sunday-Tuesday, Wednesday-Thursday, Friday-Saturday) or two periods (e.g., Sunday-Wednesday and Thurs-Saturday). Regarding the exact times that the work is due, you might want to consider scheduling due date times at least one hour before the university Help Desk closes. That way, if there are any technical problems, the students can turn to the Help Desk, rather than send you late-night emails. For more information and Help Desk Hours contact information select the following link:

Boise State Office of Information Technology

Of course, many students are used to having due date times that occur at 11:59 PM on the due date, so you may get some students that will complain that they don’t have enough time to submit their assignments on the due date because of their work schedules or some other reason. One possible response to this complaint could be to explain that if students want to submit the work earlier than the due date–for example, after work on Monday instead of Tuesday–they have that option. They just need to schedule their study and practice activities so that they are able to submit everything by the due date. You will also want to explain to the students that you want to make absolutely sure that Help Desk support is available to them in case they have any technical difficulties in submitting their assessments or assignments.

Key Characteristic #3: Provide Students With Appropriate and Timely Feedback

It is important to provide students with several opportunities to receive feedback on their performance every week. The reason for this is because research has shown that student achievement increases significantly when students receive appropriate feedback at the right time. For example, Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, and Kulik (1991) conducted a meta-analysis on the effects of repeated classroom testing. They reported significant gains in student achievement when the number of formative assessments was increased over a 15-week period (see figure below).

By providing appropriate and timely feedback every week, you can expect to see higher levels of student achievement than you would with only a few opportunities for feedback spread throughout the course. The feedback does not all have to come from major exams. Students can also get feedback on papers, lab reports, chapter quizzes, etc. If you provide students with regular feedback about their performance, they will have a better sense of how they are doing in the course and the amount of time and mental effort they need to devote to their studies to get the grade they want.

Please don’t think that you have to provide detailed feedback on everything that students submit. Sometimes a simple quiz score can help students know what they need to do to make more progress in your course. To keep your own workload reasonable, some assessments may be automatically graded or peer grading may be incorporated into the course. Your instructional design consultant can suggest some ways to provide sufficient feedback while keeping your workload reasonable.

A Definition of Feedback

If we want to create effective instructional activities, there needs to be feedback between the instructor and students as they carry out the activities. The following information about feedback may also be of help to you as you design your learning activities.

Feedback can be defined as any shared information that helps students:

(a) understand how well they are performing their assigned roles or tasks

      AND

(b) know what is needed to make progress towards the goal(s) of the conversation.

In this seminar, we are concerned with designing feedback that helps students achieve the learning objectives. However, not all feedback will help students do this! Kluger and DiNisi (1998) conducted an extensive review of research studies on the effects of performance feedback in the workplace. They found that about one-third of all feedback strategies resulted in improved performance. This is good news, because it confirms the usefulness of feedback in helping people learn new knowledge and skills. But it is also bad news, because the study revealed that one-third of the feedback strategies had no effect at all. Worse yet, one-third of the strategies actually reduced performance! That’s right. The feedback made them less effective and efficient in their work tasks. Clearly, not all feedback is equal. But what is the difference between feedback that improves student achievement and feedback that makes it worse?

Kluger and DiNisi (1998) suggest that when feedback is focused on clear goals and current performance of the work tasks, it can have a positive effect. Helpful feedback will show people how to change what they are currently doing to reach their goals. Feedback will have no effect or a negative effect when it focuses on the person instead of the task. Also, feedback decreases performance when it is used to blame people or hold them responsible for reaching unclear goals. That type of feedback can demotivate people very quickly and focus their attention on defending themselves against unfair treatment, instead of focusing on the task and figuring out how to complete it.

Hattie and Timperley (2009) reported that in educational settings feedback has the greatest impact when it

(a) provides information to students about their current performance on a particular task

      AND

(b) tells them how to do the task more effectively.

Hattie and Timperley claimed that feedback is more effective when it focuses on how to do a specific task correctly, instead of emphasizing mistakes or incorrect responses. Also, feedback has a greater effect when it points out how students have progressed from previous attempts at performing a challenging task. That way, the students can see that they are progressing. In addition, feedback is more effective if it directs students to close the gap between their current performance and the end goal by doing one or more of the following:

1. Increase the amount of effort to tackle more challenging tasks.
2. Develop error detection skills, which leads to better self-feedback.
3. Look for better strategies or information that will help in performing the task. (p. 86)

On the other hand, feedback that is used to provide praise, rewards, or punishment does not have as great an impact on student performance. Also, feedback is less productive if it leads students to do any of the following:

1. Stop working toward the goal.
2. Set a less challenging goal.
3. Combine the goal with many other goals. Later on, students will only focus on the goals that are easily achieved and ignore the others.
4. Accept lower quality performance as a satisfactory completion of the goal. (p. 87)

Based on this research, Hattie and Timperley (2007) suggest that effective feedback helps students answer 3 main questions (p. 86):

Question 01: Where am I going? (What are the goals?)

Question 02: How am I doing? (What progress is being made toward the goal?)

Question 03: Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?)

Obviously, this is not the only kind of information that instructors may provide in a feedback message. However, instructors will have the greatest impact on student achievement if the feedback message helps learners answer one or more of these three questions. We will now explore the recommendations Hattie gives for helping students answer these questions.

Question 01: Where am I going?

Hattie (2012) suggests that students should be informed of the goals of a learning activity and the specific criteria that must be met to know when the goals have been achieved (p. 116). In addition, Hattie recommends that students be informed about how challenging the goals are. It turns out that if the students are not challenged by the goals, then feedback is of little value, as it can only confirm what the students already perceive–that they have the knowledge and skills and that the goal is too easy for them to really learn anything from it. Students also need to know the level of commitment required to achieve the goals. In particular, it can be helpful for them to know how much mental effort it will require and how much time they can expect to spend working toward the goal. (Have you noticed all of the time estimates in this seminar?)

Question 02: How am I doing?

Hattie (2012) recommends that students receive feedback regarding their own progress toward the goal as defined by completion of specific success criteria, not by comparing the student’s progress with that of others. In addition, Hattie suggests that progress feedback can also be related to expected standards, prior performance, and student success or failure on a specific task (p. 118).

Question 03: Where to next?

According to Hattie (2012), this is the question students are interested in the most. When instructors provide feedback related to this question, the information should not only tell them what activities they should do next, but it should also help students learn how to generate their own answers to this question. Over time, the students will acquire the skills of self-regulation so that they can answer this question on their own (p.118).

At this point, you should have a good understanding of what the three feedback questions are and why you need to ask them. As you design your learning activities, think about building in opportunities for students to receive information that helps them answer the three feedback questions. In some situations, you will want to provide the answers to the questions, as the learners may not be able to answer them on their own. But if you are engaged in an extended instructional activity–one that is repeated throughout the course–you will want to involve the learner in answering these questions until they get to the point that they can produce self-feedback to guide their study and practice.