One of the videos that our group will use in the Interactive Learning Design is a video from engVid that introduced Parallelism. The video perfectly aligned with our subject. It not only presents and explains the concept but also demonstrates examples of how to notify the parallelism in a sentence, which serves as an excellent example of our designed course activities.
Activity
The course activity will provide a learner-generated interaction to student. After watching the video, the students will have to write a post from a given topic on the course’s blog threat with at least one parallel structure. Then each student will be required to comment to posts from 2 different peers, highlighting the usage of parallelism and providing feedback or commends.
Feedback
Since the parallel structure is a fundamental grammar in the English language, the users rarely have chances to review how and where they use parallelism in their writing. This activity provides the opportunity for self-reflection, also, feedbacks and examples from peers.
As a result, a personal WordPress blog will be used as a tool for the activity. Since the course will be entirely online, access to the internet is required as well.
Work for the instructor
To avoid misconceptions, it is possible that the instructor can participate in the activity to provide feedback and comments as well. However, the instructor’s role is more likely a “knowledgeable peer” rather than an “instructor.” The primary responsibility of the instructor is to avoid incorrect/misconception commends, clarifying confusion for students. Still, this is a learner-generated interaction. The work for the instructor will be less than other interactions. Nevertheless, this is important, though, to the student, as we cannot guarantee the quality of the feedback. Having the instructor to participate as a knowledgeable peer is both manageable and worthwhile.
Potential barriers
Because the student will be writing a post that bases upon a given topic, some student may find difficult on a specific topic as the students may not have required experience or culture background. In this case, either the writer or the readers will have difficulties in writing or understanding the post. Although they may still be able to finish the task, they will be less motivated to the activity and even the rest of the course. The instructor will have to select a topic based on the background of the group of students currently teaching, or provide a common ground for the student, such as feedback of an article, to prevent potential barriers.