How can I plan my online lesson?
When planning to teach online, you should design lessons to keep students engaged in an interactive learning environment. Building dynamic lessons will increase student interest in your course and promote retention of course information. This resource will assist you in development of effective online lessons to engage your online learners.
Writing Learning Outcomes
As you would in a face-to-face course, start each online lesson with a set of clearly defined learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are statements that define the knowledge, skills and values students will gain by participating in a lesson. Writing learning outcomes is critical to ensuring that there is constructive alignment between teaching and learning activities and assessments.
The following resources will assist you in constructing well-defined learning outcomes for your course.
Planning Your Lesson
The BOPPPS lesson planner is a valuable tool for lesson planning and is aimed at increasing student engagement and deepening student learning. This model for lesson planning helps to ensure constructive alignment between your learning outcomes and your teaching and learning activities and assignments. BOPPPS is useful for planning short lessons or segments of longer lessons, which is ideal for online learning, as lessons divided into shorter segments tend to increase student engagement.
Components of the BOPPPS model
- Bridge-In – Gains learner attention, builds motivation and establishes lesson relevance.
- Outcomes – Specifies learning intention, establishes what the successful learner should think, know or value by the end of the lesson.
- Pre-Assessment – Determine what students already know about the subject matter and what they are interested in.
- Participatory Learning – Allows learners to be actively involved in achieving the outcomes of the lesson, improves understanding and deepens learning.
- Post-Assessment – Determine what the students have learned and if learning outcomes were met.
- Summary – Conclude and wrap up learning experience, provide sense of completion and set stage for next lesson.
You can download the following infographic, which summarizes the main elements of the BOPPPS model.
For BOPPPS templates and more information, consult the following resources: