Posted 1:41 PM by George Siemens
One of the difficulties we had in designing the Dining Room CD ROM was incorporating authentic practice activities...How do you teach online what used to be taught face to face? Or how can effective learning be ensured when the instructor cannot give direct feedback?

Obviously not all material benefits from a transition to online...some activities are best handled one-on-one with an instructor and a student. We did manage, however, to build some practice activities that closely duplicate actual activities...i.e. setting a "virtual table"....

An article in Learning Circuits (Practice Makes Performance), draws a distinction between first generation elearning (infrastructure development for information delivery), second generation elearning (improving effectiveness of infrastructure and management of information), and the need for authentic practice activities...true learning happens once information has been "internalized" and has impacted behaviour/performance...

Quote: "Transfer research consistently concludes that a critical element to the transfer of learning includes opportunities to practice skills in varied contexts with monitoring and feedback that identifies and corrects misconceptions and faulty reasoning"...interesting...