[DG: Teaching & Learning] rethinking/simplifying learning activities

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hi Bruce
I think you'll find a lot of support for this idea of everything being a task. Clay (who's on the URG) has been an advocate of this since day one, not just for course activities, but for assigning things to yourself and to team members. The lead designer, Sam, did an early design almost three years ago that looked very much like a to do list. And we of course were inspired to do the learning activities project  because not only would a student have to look in four or more different tools to know what assignments they had in a class (multiply that by number of classes), but instructors had to figure out all those tools; our early sketches tried to offer instructors a way to create these items both from a to do like entry as well as a syllabus like entry.

Although I'm not working with the OAE initiative anymore, I'm very eager to see them take this on. However, as you may know, the idea of assigning things was in the fourth quarter of last year's roadmap and I believe it's been pushed out again to the last quarter of the second year's roadmap. 

In the meantime, I've been trying to push for improvements in the CLE that head in that direction, like Tests & Quizzes pushing links to the Schedule tool, as Assignments 1 does. If we could build a list view into the Calendar widget and one of the CLE mobile apps, students would have some of what they need. It's what we can do for now but yeah, it's not everything so I hope the OAE gets this right from the ground up; every indication is that they want to do just that.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus at gmail.com>
To: "pedagogy Learning" <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 7:15:50 AM
Subject: [DG: Teaching & Learning] rethinking/simplifying learning activities

I've been working out some ideas on learning activity design in OAE,
and wonder what people here think?

So here's a textual description on Google+:

<https://plus.google.com/105827662080581152585/posts/5eqJB2PFgZq>

And here's the sort of UI I am imagining for inspiration (from a new
task management/GTD app):

<http://assets.lifehack.org/wp-content/files/2011/03/wunderlist-windows.png>

E.g. from the perspective of the learner (which should be our
priority), their activity in OAE would be organized around a unified,
extensible, list of tasks. Throw out entirely "assignments, "quizzes"
and so forth.

Bruce
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