Online instructional strategies are known as the soft technologies. In this course created by I-22 OCoP, the learners or participants will be using the Internet to complete a series of activities. Each of the lessons are comprised of such activities.. Lesson activities are aligned with course objectives and learning outcomes.
Looking closely at the selected activities participants work primarily in small groups so that there is sufficient learner to learner interaction. This is a constructivist instructional activity. For example, in the Digital Equity lesson, participants gathered to work on creating a survey so that they could use that instrument with their own students once they returned to the classroom.
When building learning systems two things to consider are the needs of the intended learners and the intended learning outcome of the course. For this OCoP It helps then to find out what their backgrounds are in terms of content knowledge, technology use, type of access to the Internet and frequency with which they use the Internet. If we know how much they already know, then we would not repeat teaching something they already know. Under this same lense we should consider sharing the intended learning outcomes for the course to help us set up prerequisites for the learning and to help with the type of learning system to utilize.
This is an awesome resource on effective online instructional strategies. Now that I have a better understanding, I will make sure to implement some of these.