Gagne’s Events of Instructions

What are some of the necessary things that should be included in the e-learning slides to grab hold of the learners’ attention?

1) Gain the attention of the learners throughout the whole process
- Pictures
- Videos
- Interesting quotes
2) Informing learners regarding the objectives of the particular topic
- State what they should learn by the end of these slides
- Make sure that they have learnt these objectives after the end of the slides
3) Stimulating recall of prior learning
- Some questions can be asked regarding the previous slides to see whether the learners can recall what they have learnt previously
- Also can act as a form of revision for the learners
4) Presenting the stimulus
- Make sure that the content is understandable and user-friendly
- Try not to insert too many words in one slide as the learners would tend to get bored easily
5) Provide guidance to the learners
- Provide some relevant examples to the learners to help them better understand the topic they are learning
- A simple scenario regarding the topic can also be included to help them understand how this topic can be applied to their everyday life.
- Audio can be included in the presentation to guide the learners throughout the slides
6) Eliciting performance
- A short quiz (consisting of MCQs) can be given at the end of the topic to test them on their understanding towards the particular topic. However, they will not be graded as this is to provide opportunity for them to perform
- Other than a short quiz, there could be some online exercises for the learners to do after the topic. These online exercises can act as homework to the learners for them to perform
7) Providing feedback
- Learners must have the opportunity to give valuable feedbacks to the instructor to see what the instructor can improve on to make the e-learning more interactive and enjoyable to the learners
- From here, the instructor must make use of the feedbacks and review its e-learning package
8) Assessing performance
- Instructor can do this by giving a test regarding some topics that have been taught to the learners. From here, the marks reveal whether the learners got learnt anything from the online e-learning or not.
- Can be given through MCQs, Open-ended questions, Case-study questions, discussion questions etc
9) Enhancing retention and transfer
- Instructor is recommended to provide review after the learners have completed the test so as to see where they went wrong and learn their mistakes
- Additional exercises can be given to learners to complete so that as they practice more, they understand more regarding the topic. Thus, they will not commit the same mistakes again in the test
To conclude, it is the best to include all of these in your e-learning package. If there is anything missing, things might not go your own way...

Hot Potatoes

Review of Hot Potatoes

Many people think that this application is associated with food. However, this is not so. This application is specialized in creating assessments to test the learners what they have learnt during their e-learning, as well as to interact with the learners too. These include cloze passages, quizzes, crossword puzzles, matching exercises and jumbled-sentence exercises. Learners are also able to learn their own mistakes after the completion of their assessment as the correct answers are always shown after they complete the respective assessment.

For cloze passages, learners are given a passage related to their learning with blanks in it. The task for the learners is to read the passage carefully and fill up the blanks with the correct answer to obtain the allocated marks.

For quizzes, it is somehow similar to the MCQ (Multiple-Choice Questions) test. Only MCQ are given in the quiz and the learners are expected to read the MCQ carefully to select the correct option for it. This then enables them to obtain the marks allocated for each MCQ.

For crossword puzzles, the learners are given a puzzle with blanks to fill in the correct letters to form different words. How would the learners know what to fill into the blanks? They are given a hint to each word and the number of blanks corresponds to the number of letters that form that word. Therefore, 1 of the criteria to obtain the correct answer is to see whether the word fills up the blanks given or not. If the blanks are filled up, you are most probably getting the correct answer.

For matching exercises, the learners are tested to match the correct sequence when given “The process of distillation” for example. This is to test their understanding on the process of distillation to see which comes first and which comes last. If the learners have the correct sequence of “The process of distillation”, then they are able to obtain the allocated marks.

Lastly for jumbled-sentence exercises, the learners are expected to re-arrange the jumbled words to form the correct sentence. There might be more than 1 correct answer to it. Therefore, the learners must read the jumbled-sentence question carefully so as to understand it and correct the sentence to obtain the marks given.

To conclude the review of Hot Potatoes, this application is free for download and easy to use. Therefore, this application is mostly recommended for the instructor who creates the respective e-learning website to test the understanding of the learners.