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

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu> wrote:
> 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.

Cool.

On this last point, I'm also very much in favor of transforming our
notion of a syllabus too, where the "schedule" component of it is
essentially just a different (class-specific) view of the same thing
(a list of tasks and/or topics).

> 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.

I'm mainly concerned that OAE be done right, rather than quickly.
Indeed, my idea of this as a kind of extensible activity framework
might help enable both a good, clean, design, and also to develop it
more quickly and iteratively; not as a monolithic thing, as on a kind
of component model.

> 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.

Great; thanks Keli!

Bruce