The Lesson activity allows you to create materials on the platform that independently and automatically adapt to both the decisions and the progress of individual students.

Lesson acts similarly to a simple computer program, with a pre-programed way of responding to student’s actions.

The potential applications of ‘Lesson’ are broad. For example, the lesson can be programed to redirect the student to either an easier or a more difficult part of the material in response to a decision that the student made, or as a consequence of whether or not a question was answered correctly. It can be used to create a game which will show the consequences of the student’s decisions and score them accordingly. Educational resources can also be created that will provide content which is interesting to the student, and skip issues that are not of interest.

Advantages

The advantage of a ‘Lesson’ activity is that it can assist you not only to broaden the scope of knowledge transfer, but also if you wish to train students’ decision-making skills based on the knowledge provided. Lessons activate acquired knowledge and its application to specific problems.

Another advantage of the ‘Lesson’ is the insight it gives you into your students’ progress, their preferences, and any problems they might face in applying knowledge in practice.

Disadvantages

A ‘lesson’ activity requires you to devote a significant amount of your time to preparing the pathways that students can follow, and then implementing these pathways on the platform before the lesson can ‘go live’. You must strategically plan the module’s responses to a wide variety of specific student activities and responses.

Note: The use of a ‘lesson’ activity makes sense where you want to put the emphasis on decisions made by the student leading to divergent subsequent paths. The branching points between different paths through the material typically depend on the answers to one specific question at a time. On the other hand, if you would like to create resources that successively check student knowledge at subsequent stages along a shared path (that does not diverge significantly), then it would be better to use ‘Quiz’ activities, possibly using the option that requires passing each quiz before the next batches of material is revealed to the student.