RODP Course Content

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Interactive Content

Checklist Tool

The D2L Checklist tool provides students with a visual guideline to determine what they need to accomplish to complete the course. As courses become saturated with content files, it becomes difficult for students to locate the correct files needed for particular assignments. Teachers use the checklist to organize the learning activities and due dates, to simplify navigation for the student and to provide a means of tracking completion of items.

While instructor's can effectively use the Checklist tool to orgainize material in smaller components for the student should they become overwhelmed by seeing too many activities or content at once. In an attempt to be more student-centered, course developers need to take advantage of the Checklist.

PowerPoint

One of the major attempts in online education is to make the learning experience of students in online courses as close as possible to the learning experience of students in on-ground courses. Using PowerPoint in an online course can be an interactive experience which is similar to the on-ground experience when the audio lecture that is always present in the classroom is also in the online version.

However, many course developers are tempted to take PowerPoint presentations that they have created or that came directly from the publisher, and simply drop them into their course as the primary form of content without an audio lecture. But how effective would it be for a presenter using PowerPoint to simply start clicking through the slides without any form of lecture? That doesn't happen because that's not the way PowerPoint is intended to be used. Yet, over and over again, course developers put PowerPoint presentations into online classes without any audio lecture, and somehow think the student's learning experience is going to be the same as it is in the classroom.

Now this isn't to say that PowerPoint can't be used in an online course just because it wasn't designed for that specific use. But what is does say is that PowerPoint should not be used in an online environment unless the developer has taken the time to record his/her audio lecture into the slides, giving the students the same lecture that they would have heard had they been watching the same PowerPoint presentation in the classroom lecture.

Web 2.0

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