Supporting Student Activities
To help students learn effectively within the VLE, you need to plan tasks or activities that will help them gain knowledge and understanding of concepts. These activities will help your students in constructing their ideas about concepts through interactions with you (as their tutor), with other students and with learning materials: the students learn from the feedback they receive from you and their peers (Palinscar, 1998). Activities can range from something as short as reading an article and discussing core issues, to completing a group design project lasting several weeks. The former is likely to be composed of a single activity with an associated article, while the latter may integrate a range of activities and resources. Designing activities that can be reused or repurposed is of essential importance in ensuring that the design of your course can easily be updated or scaled up.
Until recently, online courses have been designed as large, monolithic blocks (Downes, 2000) , rather than as small chunks comprising activities and content resources that will allow courses to be much more easily scaled up, updated and repurposed for specific learning contexts. These chunks - reusable learning resources - are sometimes referred to as "Learning Objects".
