When your programs are open to enrolment every day of the year, there are many challenges to authenticating and personalising the student learning journey. With 20 years’ experience teaching in the VET sector, I developed a several options enhancing the online learning experience and have a few tips and tricks to share.
To start you must grab the student’s attention early – First Impressions count! Including an introductory video explaining how the qualification works and providing a detailed course induction in an eBook. The Induction covers all the critical information a student needs to succeed, how they will be assessed and how to track their progress.
We personalise support using the re-engagement tool (a moodle plugin) that provides personalised emails based on criteria such as time since enrolment or the completion or non-completion of work. The re-engagement emails are also used to notify our assessors of students that may be falling behind to prompt them to contact the student.
To provide students with practical learning opportunities we have developed a range of authentic project scenarios, where new information regarding the project progression is provided as the student progresses through the unit assessment.
Given the large volume of students in our qualifications to minimise our marking whilst retaining an authentic assessment we have included a few complex quizzes – these have mostly been built using the Cloze Question type that enables us to capture administrative tasks where the student analyses information and completes administration type tasks including numeric calculations to record their responses into a computer marked quiz.
So come to learn more on these ideas and tips to make learning more engaging, assessments more realistic and contextualised for the digital environment and ease the pressure of your teaching workload.
