Learning Activities

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What are Learning Activities and Why are They Important?

Continuing with the Backward Design approach, the next step in mapping your course is to select learning activities. Learning activities are events and opportunities that support student learning and the achievement of targeted course objectives. They should align with the course objectives and module objectives and should help prepare students for the assessments.

In addition to identifying and implementing learning activities that will help prepare students for course assessments, identify learning activities that actively engage your students and provide them with a variety of interactions and engagement throughout your course. Designing and delivering a course in a different modality presents you with the unique opportunity to adopt new learning activities or modify existing learning activities you have used in your face-to-face courses.

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Learning Activities in Online Courses

Explore the various learning activities that can be used in asynchronous online courses. 

Click on the headings below to expand and view the information. 

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 Learning Activities Should...

...align with course objectives and assessments. Course objectives serve as the foundation for your course design and as such, they should guide all aspects of your course including your learning activities.

...provide students with multiple means of engagement, representation, and action/expression. Recall that effective instruction is learner-centered instruction. By providing activities using the following Universal Design for Learning principle of multiple means of engagement, representation, and action/expression in your course, you are able to create an inclusive course design that can benefit all learners. 

...promote active learning and provide a variety of interactions for students. When selecting learning activities for your course, it's important to also consider how the students will be interacting with the content. Interacting in a variety of ways helps to solidify the new material. It's important that activities are selected that provide a variety of interactions for the learners allowing them to not only interact with the content but provide opportunities to interact with their peers and with you as the course instructor. Be sure to also integrate activities that provide opportunities for practice through which students can obtain feedback on their learning progress and make improvements or seek intervention as needed. 

...encourage motivation, self-efficacy, and reflection. Research has shown that activities that motivate students, promote self-efficacy, and provide opportunities for reflection can strengthen the learning experience and improve the long-term retention of new information. As such, be sure to integrate activities that promote these tenets. This is recommended at the module level; however, if this is not possible, ensure that targeted activities that promote motivation and reflection and intentionally distributed throughout the course at pivotal moments to help promote student success. 

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The original document of Learning Activities above are a derivative of LSU’s Active Learning While Physical Distancing collaborative document by Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner, Associate Professor at Louisiana State University (with collaborative input from various groups, including members of the LSU LTC  and the POD Network) and the Rollins Teaching Resources course Links to an external site. by Dr. Brooklynn Lehner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.