Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing (review)

Distance and blended educational programs and the use of technology for instruction have proliferated in recent years. For many instructors, the focus has been closely tied to the development and adoption of new technologies and the transference of face-to-face teaching pedagogy to new delivery formats.

On the flip side of this focus are a set of questions that to date have not received as much attention. How can faculty learn to teach differently and how do they effectively design new pedagogy that can utilize emerging technologies to enhance the learning process in an anytime, anywhere educational culture?

Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing is an attempt to address these critical questions and provide some helpful answers. The authors estimate that ”there are hundreds of thousands of new online instructors around the world each year that have very little training in teaching in the online environment” (p. vi). They therefore intend this book to help online instructors build “innovative, engaging and exciting pedagogy” (p.1). The book provides a creative, useful and varied set of exercises and approaches to enhancing technology-based instruction.

But what really makes this text useful is the foundational design of the text and its goal of addressing “diverse learning needs, backgrounds, expectations, preferences and styles” (p. vii). The text is structured to apply learning theory, acknowledging that individual students learn differently and have different learning needs. Second, they recognize that the comfort with, and understanding, use, and application of technology is different among generations, both for the instructors and for the various generational groups that technology-based instruction intends to reach. Third, they recognize that some differences in learning are culturally influenced. These distinctive infusions of “instructional difference” add to the book’s usefulness and its application to technology-based instruction.

The text is based on a practical instructional model, R2D2 (Read, Reflect, Display, and Do), that the authors developed to address the challenges created by the various “diverse instructional needs.“ The four components of the model emphasize reading, reflecting, displaying, and doing as distinct phases of learning activity. The 10 chapters are systematically organized in discussion, exercises, and applications to reflect this model, linking the model’s components to “various types of learners: auditory, verbal, reflective, observational, visual, kinesthetic, and tactile” (p. 6).

The authors repeatedly state that the model is not an instructional model, but a “non-linear framework” that provides a dynamic approach to online learning and instructional design. It was intentionally crafted to provide flexibility and adaptability for the instructor and not to prescribe a specific method or instructional approach. “R2D2 is not an instructional design model; instead, it is a framework for the design of online learning environments and activities” (p. 4).

Each descriptive chapter is followed by a chapter that includes various activities applicable to that component. For example, Chapter 2 describes the reading component (Phase 1 of the model) through a discussion of verbal and auditory learners and the use of reading in the learning process. Then Chapter 3 provides 25 online activities for auditory and verbal learners organized into subtopics: a brief summary, purpose, skills and objectives, advice and ideas, variations and extensions of the exercise, and other instructional considerations for each activity. Each activity summary also provides five indices of risk, time, cost, learner-centeredness, and duration of the learning activity. The authors repeat this pattern for each of the remaining chapters. A final chapter integrates the model’s components.

This book is clearly designed to be a “finger-tip” resource for faculty involved in technology-based instruction. As a blended delivery instructor at the doctoral level, I have found the text useful and insightful. Its basic organization, the use of tables throughout, and the activity index at the end makes it easy to quickly find activities that meet specific needs. The extensive variety of activities offers a wealth of approaches that...