Course Outline Assignment- Engagement

Week's Summary

This week along with continued work on our course outline assignment rough drafts, we learned about how important it is to get the students engaged in the materials we are teaching. Keeping the students engaged is directly related to how they will learn the information we are presenting. The primary indicators of engagement in an online course (which most of us are creating for the course outline assignment) learning environment are the amount of interaction between students and the quality of that interaction. This goes on into relevance, which we also learned about in this module. What is relevance? Making an assignment relevant is when you make the material meaningful to the students. It is super important to inform the students why they are doing a certain activity. It's never good when the students just feel like your course consists of busy work they are doing for no reason. The effect of relevance is that students will be more interested in the material. The more likely they are to pay attention the more likely they are to retain the information being taught for the future. There are three forms of relevance: past, current, and future. Past relevance might strike the interest in one or two students, but probably not the whole group. This is when students want to know why a certain phenomenon occurred. Current relevance is material that will immediately affect the students. Learning specific information that will be used in the near future but probably forgotten. Future relevance is material that will affect students in the future. This is the highest rate of relevance because students are more likely to remember information they will need again at some point in the future. Relevance and engaging information go hand in hand. If the information is relevant the students will automatically be more engaged in learning.

Item of Interest

This week my item of interest is actually how to make my information I am teaching about the guitar relevant and engaging to the students. I am trying to come up with ways to make the assessments I am using be engaging to the students. Yes, the course I am teaching is important but I want to make the this class really fun and interesting. Learning how to play an instrument should be fun!

Problem or Concern

I don't really have a problem or concern this week. Other trying to make my course engaging and interesting for the students. I want them to enjoy learning how to play the guitar. I don't want it to seem like a hassle to do the assignments or assessments for the course. I'm not sure if that is really possible though.