The framework for e-tivities- used to design. It's very well researched and deployed. Make sure you don't miss out a step!

E-tivities - Introduction

E-tivities are frameworks for enabling active and participative learning. They are researched and applied frameworks which are valuable for blend and hybrid as well as fully digital. 

They are highly personalised, fully promote and enable learning sets and teams, and directly enable authentic assessment and feedback.

E-tivities are important because they deploy useful, well-rehearsed principles and pedagogies for learning as well as your choice of networked technologies. They focus on the learners who are contributing, providing, reworking, interpreting, combining most of the knowledge.

​They overturn the idea that learning depends on one big expert and his/her conveying of knowledge. They are based on the strong idea that knowledge is constructed by learners through and with others.


E-tivities are for:

  • at least two people working and learning together in some way, and usually many more,
  • participants who are not in the same locations. But e-tivities are also easily combined with location-based , synchronous, hybrid, learning and teaching activities,
  • a wide range of people, including those with disabilities who can be assisted through the technologies. The more diverse, the better the e-tivities work.
  • everyone: e-tivities have attracted the interest of learning designers, academics, teachers and trainers from many sectors and levels of education.
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The E-tivity Invitation

E-tivities are:

  • designed in advance of the participants’ online arrival
  • quick and easy to produce, making the work of the tutor or the person I call the e-moderator, much faster, easier and productive
  • suitable for entirely online programmes, for integrated and blended learning, mobile learning and everything in between
  • cheap to create and run
  • scalable and customizable
  • efficient for designers, participants and e-moderators
  • reusable and easy to try out, recycle, reuse and change: they improve the more they are deployed and adapted.

E-tivities are valuable for:

  • engaging and motivating learners to work together 
  • forming a whole course or programme when sequenced with care
  • or useful if you want to try out one or two online activities
  • encouraging a very wide variety of contributions and perspectives and for tapping into participants’ up-to-date ideas and authentic experiences
  • replacing or supporting all other learning and teaching methods
  • any discipline, professionals or field of learning and for all topics

The purposes of e-tivities are to:

  • enable academics, designers, curriculum developers and teachers to design for online participation by their students
  • provide learners with an effective scaffold to support them in achieving the learning outcomes
  • enable learners and e-moderators to work together on key learning resources
  • promote a learner-centred, task or problem-based approach to online learning (moving away from content-centric design)
  • challenge and motivate participants to critique, contribute, review and consolidate ideas in a focused way
  • increase learner engagement
  • save staff time
  • make the course productive and fun
  • deploy easily the newer technologies- XR, AI, video, social media ( work well as 'sparks' to start the dialogue, and for interaction, for feedback)
  • find easily purposeful ways of using freely available, topical and/or fun resources within the learning design
  • incorporate sound pedagogical principles quickly into teaching and learning, including into large scale online approaches such as MOOCs

To design e-tivities you need to:

  • have a way of thinking about the purpose and process of each e-tivity, and get it into draft format (the storyboard)
  • work out how to place it ultimately into a learning sequence (the scaffold)
  • write it in a way so that it can be placed online and participants can follow it (the invitation).

How to -E-tivities 

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E-tivities Framework - Extract from E_tivities, The Key to Active Online Learning (2ndEdition)