It is easy to upload content into your Brightspace courses. As you are designing assignments you may be asking yourself “how much can I reasonably expect my students to accomplish outside of class?” How much is too much? In a recent Brightspace Community article, Catrina Ascenuik, provided some suggestions for creating a custom learning path to help prevent information overload for learners. Her suggestions are:
Use Release Conditions – Create a custom learning path through the materials in your course using Release Conditions. When a Release Condition is attached to an item, learners cannot see that item until they meet the associated condition. You can find more information in Brightspace Tip #237: Release Conditions.
Use Start Dates, Due Dates, and End Dates – Use availability dates to schedule lesson delivery. By doing so instructors can determine when certain content in their courses will become available to learners. You can find more information in Brightspace Tip #248: Drip-Feeding.
Other Resources Section – There just isn’t enough time to show learners everything. Distinguish between those items that are required and those items that are recommended. Create an extra resources section for recommended items that learners can look at in their own time. This could be added at the end of each module or at the end of the course.
Estimate Time for Course Content + Work – You should have a sense of how long it will take learners to go through the content and to complete the assignments. Here is the Wake Forest University: Workload Estimator that can help you gauge how long a module will take a learner to complete.
Have you found ways to customize a learning path or reduce information overload for your learners in your Brightspace courses? If so, we would like to hear about it. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog post.
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Image credit: "Information overload is painful" by bandita is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0