Best Practice 9: Combine Core Concept Learning with Customized and Personalized Learning

Instructional designers, curriculum developers, and instructors identify the core concepts to be learned in a course - the performance goals - and then mentor learners through a set of increasingly complex and even customized projects applying these core concepts.

Supporting learners with their professional goals that are closely linked to the performance goals of a course and even beyond the course parameters is a win-win for the learners individually and as a class. How does one do this? Building in options and choices in assignments and special projects is a way to do this. Offering resources for deeper (and individualized) learning can also promote this concept.

A popular new teaching and learning mantra advocates making students' thinking visible. Making thinking visible requires students to create, talk, write, explain, analyze, judge, report and inquire (in a forum that all participants can view). These types of activities make it clear to students themselves, to the faculty, and to fellow learners what students know or don't know, what they are puzzled about and about what they might be curious.

Discussion forums, blogging, journals and small group work are all excellent strategies for engaging learners in clarifying and enlarging their mental models or concepts and building links and identifying relationships.

Resource: The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips By Judith V. Boettcher, Rita-Marie Conrad, Jossey-Bass (2010)