Introduction

Last week focused on describing your students and considered how to meet their learning needs.

During this week, you will be introduced to the learning design activity types (Figure 1, below) and consider how you could use these to design an effective intervention for your chosen tricky topic.

By the end of this week you should be able to:

• create an activity profile to inform the design of your chosen intervention
• understand how the use of a profile helps to create a balanced student experience.

This approach has been used to design course materials at The Open University for several years and has shown that teachers are able to be more creative, and think more critically, about teaching and learning and the student experience, and feel more confident about the design decisions they make. It is recognised that students are more successful in their learning when they engage in a range of different activities. In particular, talking about a tricky topic with their peers enables students to get a better grasp of the concepts and gives teachers an opportunity for informal assessment of learning by listening to the student discussion.