Designers will review the course goals and objectives to help determine the best activities to use. A learning activity includes how the instructor presents the material and what tasks we want the learner to perform during the course. A tool that can help identify these tasks is Bloom's Taxonomy Wheel.

The Glossary of Education Reform (2014) defines Bloom's Taxonomy as a "system used to identify the different levels of human cognition" (para. 1). Designers and educators often refer to it to create assessments or tasks. The levels of cognition are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Taking the instructional goal and objective, use Bloom's Taxonomy Wheel (n.d.) to identify learning tasks to use. For example, for this specific section, the goal is to have the learner understand instructional activities. One of the objectives is to define what instructional activities are. When looking at Bloom's Wheel below, this objective falls under the level of understanding. The objective has an action verb of "define." In this wheel, we do not see the word "define," but there are synonyms, such as describe or explain. Now we can review what assessments or task the learners can perform that connects to the objective. The wheel has choices such as journaling, reading, or participating in a discussion.

While much instruction may be lectured based, there are many options to incorporate other activities in between lectures. The activities are not only engaging, which can help the learner retain the information, but could also be used as knowledge checks. Are you looking for instructional activity ideas? Check out the Business training works website for 25 activities that could be added to a training workshop.

References

Bloom’s Taxonomy Wheel. (n.d.). Retrieved January 15, 2023 from https://apps.tlt.stonybrook.edu/bloomsTaxonomyWheel/

Brown, A. H., & Green, T. D. (2020). The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental Principles with Process and Practice (4th ed.). Routledge (Taylor & Francis).

Business training works. (n.d.). Goodbye Blah Blah Blah Engage!: 25 Activities for Making Lecture-Based Training Active. Retrieve January 23, 2023 from https://www.businesstrainingworks.com/training-resource/25-activities-for-making-lecture-based-training-active/

Flowe, T. (2020). Girl raises her hand in class [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/NTur2_QKpg0?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText

The Glossary of Education Reform. (2014, March 5). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Retrieved January 15, 2023 from Bloom’s Taxonomy Definition (edglossary.org)