In drafting an activity, it’s beneficial to provide context for your students. Think about the goal/purpose of the activity – how does it tie to the learning objective, or the desired outcome of the particular activity?

Types of Interactions

When designing courses and learning experiences, it’s crucial to consider various forms of interactions to enhance engagement, deepen understanding, and promote effective learning. There are four types of interactions learners should experience within a course, implementing a combination of each will strengthen the learners motivations, connection to the content, and their connections with people.

Learner-to-Learner

Learners interacting with their peers can be highly beneficial for collaborative learning. This type of interaction promotes critical thinking and social interaction. We want to foster communities where students can share insights, be responsive to one another, provide support, and share feedback. A few ways to implement this type of connection is through:

Discussion board conversations (formal and informal)
Group activities
Synchronous discussions
Debates
Peer Review

Learner-to-Instructor

This interaction occurs between the learners and the instructor or facilitator. Instructor interactions provide personalized guidance, answer questions, and offer feedback. These are frequent interactions that can occur through various communication channels such as:

Whole class announcements
Discussion board posts that enhance student learning, ask follow up questions, or connect students to one another’s posts
Individual emails
Grading and feedback on assessments
Synchronous lectures

Learner-to-Others

This type of interaction refers to the communication and engagement that takes place between an individual learner and other individuals inside or outside of the Adler community. This interaction can involve:

Interviewing professionals
Field Work
Clinical experiences
Practicum projects
Community-based research

Learner-to-Content

This interaction involves the learner engaging with the course content directly. This is where we encourage active learning and participation with the content. When learners interact with the content, they are more likely to comprehend and retain the information. These types of interactions can involve:

Case Studies
Reading instructional materials (textbooks, articles, journals, etc.)
Listening to lectures
Interacting with multimedia elements
Presentations

How-to

Build Activities in Canvas

There are a variety of activity types you can create in Canvas, many of which can be employed to different instructional ends.

Assignments can be used to solicit student essays, reflections, peer review activities, synchronous sessions, presentations and more.
Discussions can be used to build community, encourage peer-peer interaction and deepen students’ understanding of course concepts incorporating their peers’ perspectives.
Quizzes can be used as summative or formative learning interactions, surveys or pre-tests.
To-do Items can be produced by setting a to-do date on a Canvas Page. This will make the date appear on the syllabus’ and calendar’s list of due dates.

Types of Online Learning Activities

Reflection Assignments

In this assignment, create a reflective learning journal to evaluate your experience in the course, identify what you have learned, pinpoint areas where you struggled, and propose changes or improvements for the future. This assignment will help you consolidate your understanding of the course material, reflect on your learning process, and provide valuable feedback to improve the course for future students. Please respond to the prompts below:

What were the most valuable insights or concepts you gained from this leadership course?
Reflect on a specific leadership challenge you encountered during the course. How did you approach it, and what did you learn from the experience?
Describe a moment when you demonstrated effective leadership skills. What were the circumstances, and what strategies did you employ?
How has your understanding of leadership evolved since the beginning of the course? In what ways has your perspective or behaviors changed?
Identify any areas of personal development and skill improvement that you have recognized through this course? How do you plan to address the areas moving forward?
Reflect on the interactions and collaboration with your fellow participants. What insights or lessons did you gain from these experiences?

Case Studies

Case Studies

Provide a 3-5 page case study analysis of a hypothetical situation inspired from real events. When doing your analysis and writing your case, you will need to address the following areas:

Identify all relevant organization theories which may be embedded within the facts of the case
Elaborate on the type of organization involved in terms of size and structure
Provide recommendations on how to improve this situation

The summary should be written in a scholarly manner, complete and include a thorough analysis of the issue(s) written at the graduate level. Outside sources are encouraged and should be relevant, reputable and cited correctly using APA format.

Research Assignments

Ethics in research group, for this project your group will create a resource to help your peers.

The question for week seven has already been created for you and is listed below. Your job is to create a resource that will compare the Belmont Report with good research practices, such as Credibility, Dependability and Transferability. Your resource will be posted for the rest of the class when the new week begins.

Research Questions

When conducting research, the researcher has a great responsibility to their participants. Good research ethics and safe guards to protect the participants’ identity should be held in the highest regard. For this discussion describe how your research will be protected. Then link your research to sample criteria in the Belmont Report. How does good ethics in research help us with Credibility, Dependability, and Transferability? Talk about research bias and other issues that might arise in qualitative research both intentional and unintentional. What safe guards can be put into place to prevent research bias and exaggeration of results?

Best Practices

Activity Prompt Formulation

In drafting any online activity, it’s beneficial to begin by framing it within its context in your course and linking it to learning objectives. Other useful lines of inquiry include:

Is this a good opportunity to incorporate Adler’s mission of social justice or Adlerian principles?
What would you like your students to get out of completing the activity?
To which other course materials, if any, does it relate?
What are students expected to be able to do and how?
Should students be asked to work together, either by collaborating on a project or simply by reviewing their peers’ efforts?
How will their work be assessed and how will this be communicated to students?