Ways to Offer Creative Online Activities

Believe it or not, most of the learning activities that you are using in face-to-face classes are adaptable to online formats. Online activities do not necessarily have to be limited to formats like "read a paper and submit your reflections" or "submit a paper that answers the following questions". There are many types of fun activities that you might want to consider when creating online activities,

Below are some example activities that our online instructors have found useful in their online courses, especially from the perspective of sharpening students' critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving skills, and teamwork skills.

Debate
Debate is a fun and challenging activity for students to participate online. Using debate students can develop several skills simultaneously, including skills to think critically, collaborate, and critique. Because online debate primarily take place in asynchronous text-based discussion board, students usually has to write up their argument, evidences, and rebuttals. Therefore, students ability to write and listen to others' opinion can be sharpened via debates as well.

Below is a sample adaptation of traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate format to an online format. Pay attention to how the debate teams are taking terms between weeks to allow each other a time to talk and reflect.
(Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debate Links to an external site. )

Role Play
Role play is an effective way for students to develop in-depth knowledge on one topic because it allows students to assume a new identity, and therefore, students are able to perceive, think, and behavior from the perspective of that particular identity or role that they take on. It is a powerful way to motivate students to go further in their research; It is a fun way to develop students' perspective-taking skills; it is an important way to enculturate students into whatever field that you are leading them into.

Example: In an Advertisement course, Kara asks students to research about different roles in advertising - art director, account manager, media planner, copywriter, research. Each student will pick one of these positions that they are most interested in and research about several aspects that the lecture covers regarding the role.
Group Project
Group project can be used in many online instructional settings. In WorldClassRoom you can set up groups when you receive your teaching section so that each group can have their private space to discuss, collaborate, and submit assignment as a group. In other words, you can assign students to different groups, and students can only participate in the group that he or she is assigned to. Moreover you can still give individual scores to each student while grading group work.

Example: In a Critical Thinking class, the instructor use group work to ask students discuss critically about a film in groups. The goal is to help students to develop critiquing argument skills.
Peer Review
Peer review is another great way to hone students' critical thinking skills. It is also a good way to encourage students to learn from each other. In WorldClassRoom, students can be manually assigned to review their peers' work by you as an instructor, or you can rely on the system to automatically assign students to do peer review. Here's a short how-to tutorial from Canvas on creating peer review assignment: