Bringing concepts to life
You may have favourite ways of bringing your subject to life. Here are a couple of examples from the book to get you started.
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Over several weeks I regularly emailed my student group about the night sky. During this period very bright planets Venus and Jupiter seemed to move closer together, passed and separated. This generated plenty of interest, as students realised they could see the changes from night to night. The night these planets passed each other was cloudy, but people were still able to see the event through the clouds. I received several emails from students about the excitement of watching these planets, and there was lots of discussion at tutorials. This brought to life some of the abstract course material on orbits.
(Dave Edwards, OU tutor) In Blended Learning & Online Tutoring
Guess the concept
Sometimes in my faculty (health and social care) students in tutorials draw mainly on their own experience and forget to use course concepts. The exercise is designed to overcome this and also works well in making sure the students are responding to each others' messages rather than just posting as individuals. Students are asked to describe a concept in one or two sentences without naming it. Other students guess what the concept is, then provide an example of it. The exercise can be extended to look critically at the concept and suggest times when it doesn't apply. (For example the 'biomedical model'). At the end of the exercise students have a 'bank' of course concepts which they can use for revision purposes. I've used it on a foundation level course where it's helpful in letting students see how concepts can be used. (Fiona Barnes OU tutor).
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