E-tivities - Introduction

E-tivities are frameworks for enabling active and participative online learning by individuals and groups. E-tivities are important for the online teaching and learning world because they deploy useful, well-rehearsed principles and pedagogies for learning as well as your choice of networked technologies. They focus on the learners- the people I call the participants, 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 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.

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:

•  forming a whole course or programme when sequenced with care
• also 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 such as social media
  
• 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 (Massive Open Online Courses).

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).

Extracts from E_tivities, The Key to Active Online Learning (2nd Edition) pages 6-7

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E-tivity Resources

E-tivities. The Key to Active Online Learning Book

E_tivities, The Key to Active Online Learning (2ndEdition)
Available from :
Routledge
Amazon
Amazon UK

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

E-tivity Videos

Creating E-tivities in Carpe Diem

Creating Invitations for E-tivities

Social Media for Learning Design