OREO Online Learning Wayfinding

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Give explicit instructions online

Generally speaking, teachers should always provide explicit instructions to guide students to obtain and demonstrate content knowledge and conceptual understanding. These instructions are often communicated orally in class and students have opportunities to ask questions and/or clarify their confusion. When moving to online teaching and learning model, it is paramount for teachers to communicate explicitly and clearly to students about the what and how of developing content knowledge and what they are expected in terms of demonstrating their learning. Through concise and clear instructions provided on a hyperdoc, students can be engaged and empowered to complete their online learning engagements.

Abandon the idea of “classwork” vs. “homework”.

When working online, there is only learning. Think holistically: how much total time do you have with students in a given week? What learning must be accomplished in that week? Then, imagine how a schedule might be designed to suit those parameters.
(Global Online Academy) 

A really good reminder is that students are not only learning about the content from your subject, they also have to learn how to navigate the instruction online. There might be a benefit if teachers across subjects can develop an essential agreement on communicating online instruction. This is an idea to reduce students’ cognitive load.

After reading the two articles ADA Compliance for Online Course Design and 20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course, I made an attempt to create an OREO Online Learning Wayfinding document, considering Objectives, Responsibility, Expectation, and Organization. Taking the advice from @GOALearning, online instructors need to think about time in a more holistic manner. The guiding question “How much total time do you have with students in a given week?” is very helpful in mapping out the lessons. If I have three hours in total with students online in a given week, I might chunk learning into two lessons or three lessons. If I am planning online instructions, I will use OREO Online Learning Wayfinding for each lesson to help students navigate their learning.

As I previously shared in the Do This, Not That infographic, online instructors need to avoid communicating in lengthy paragraphs with instructions that may be difficult to follow or tasks that are overly vague. Instead, online instructors can help students navigate the content and not get lost by outlining deliberate instructions and specifying the length of time to complete the session of learning.

One idea I have is to include a link to a short video (not more than 5 minutes) to greet students and give overall instructions. This introductory video link can be hyperlinked in the Learning Objective section.

In the section ‘Responsibility: Obtain content knowledge and understanding’ and ‘Expectation: Demonstrate Learning’, a recommendation is to use verbs when giving instructions and also indicate the length of time to complete the session of learning. The length of time can be either suggested for each individual item respectively or in total, depending on the needs of students. In these two sections, teachers are also encouraged to include external links to multimedia materials.

When creating a hyperdoc, a tip is to “use descriptive wording for hyperlink text (e.g., “DO-IT Knowledge Base” rather than “click here”) suggested in 20 Tips for Teaching and Accessible Online Course article. I often also observe teachers copy a very long link directly from a google doc or a website as below: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Egr_8WKc-7SwRh501nJkaSniTW7Dgz5OSY59Goj7-w0/copy

This can also increase learning cognitive load. Instead, we can simply change the text for OREO Online Learning Wayfinding and make it easy to read. If you are working on Google doc, simply press command + K (or control + K) when creating a hyperdoc. See this tip from Alice Keeler’s website.