Moving Your Courses Online: The Importance of Authentic Tasks
By Seth Crandall |
Are you in a situation where you are taking your course or campus online for the first time? Perhaps you’ve been debating and cautiously probing at it like you would a mysterious plate of food, reluctant to take the first bite. Now, with the Covid-19 experience, there is a convincing enough reason to move courses online. Faculty, schools, and administrations are quickly needing to re-tool to the new online educational environment. As we transition to designing courses online, the most effective courses will focus on having the learner perform authentic tasks.
Focus on Tasks and Let That Determine Content
I recently had the opportunity to review some online courses that were part of a university’s MBA program. Generally, a module would go much like this: read a chapter, watch a video, respond to a graded discussion, take a quiz, sit through a live session, repeat. I’m guessing we’ve all been in a course that was more or less structured this way. The focus of these courses is on providing knowledge or content to the learner. Sure, you’ll learn something, but this course type is far from impressive.
Let’s change things up where the focus of a course is not the content. Instead, the course is focused on tasks – authentic tasks to be more precise.
Authentic tasks are things one would do if they had a job, position, or role related to the subject of the course. If the course is accounting, the learners should be making balance sheets and filling in mock tax forms. If the course is on experimental design, they better be designing experiments. All courses have authentic tasks associated with them. I don’t know of an exception.
To further illustrate the point, what would a misconstrued focus on tasks look like? A text page with lecture content, a video, a discussion, and then an authentic task. That’s not quite it. Simply shoving an authentic task at the end of dumping content on the heads of a learner is not a focus on authentic tasks—it’s an afterthought.
When the focus of a course is on performing authentic tasks, everything in the course supports, prepares, and enables the learning to perform the task.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose that we are moving a business marketing course online; what would that look like if the focus is on performing authentic tasks? First, we identify an authentic marketing task, such as launching a social media campaign that will make up our first unit of instruction.
Here, we’ll map out the learning sequence needed to get the learner to perform this authentic task.
Provide Content: I would first provide a little content on the key principles of a social media campaign and provide context on why campaigns are important. At this point, I might give the learner a short, ungraded quiz that is really a learning activity and not a quiz. This quiz's function is to key the learner into the most important things they’ve learned about social media campaigns. It ensures that they pick up on the fundamental principles so that they can apply them later on.
Evaluate Examples: Then, I would show them examples, both good and poor. This is extremely important and is too often omitted from education. Learners need to have a vision of what they will be doing and what to avoid. But more than just looking at examples, they need to evaluate them against provided criteria. They need to be able to explain why a social media campaign is effective or not.
Demonstrate Steps: The learner needs to see any applicable steps to creating a campaign. What do phases 1, 2, and 3 look like, etc.?
Practice and Formative Feedback: Using the demonstrated steps, they practice creating a campaign. Perhaps they are given a mock company to use as context for their campaign. The learner needs to receive formative feedback. It could be peer feedback, instructor feedback, or some other valid means. However, they need to understand what they are doing well and where they are missing the mark.
Receive Final Product and Summative Feedback: Using the formative feedback, the learner creates a final social media campaign and perhaps presents it to their class or a group. They should receive summative feedback.
This is a good example of how to focus on tasks and not content. The order and complexity of each element may vary from course to course. Still, the focus on performing authentic tasks should stay the same.
Analyzing the above example, notice that the learner is actively doing something to practice and perform the authentic task in most of the steps. Everything is building up to the learner performing the entire task at the end of the module.
This instructional pattern dictates what content will be presented. Instead of the content being content for content’s sake, the content serves the purpose of supporting the learner in performing a valuable task making the learning more memorable and meaningful.
If you are in a position where you are transitioning online or simply tweaking your online course, give it a go. Evaluate your course with the steps and examples given above and identify how you could improve. If you see that your course is focused on content instead of tasks, start by revamping one section of your course to a task focus. I hope it goes well!
AUTHOR
Seth Crandall - Learning Designer, Construct