Pre-Workshop Activities
- In order to get participants prepared to engage in active learning as quickly as possible during face-to-face workshop time, it is important to get them up to speed and oriented by providing them with pre-workshops videos or other materials so that they can learn the basics about the technology or skill they will learn before they arrive at the workshop. It is very likely that you’ll be able to find most of these materials freely available online, but you may need to create some pre-workshop materials if you cannot find anything suitable to link to on YouTube or on the wider internet.
- Refer back to the SMART learning outcomes you created in Activity #1 and review all the learning outcomes that you will not cover in the in-class activities so that hopefully you can cover them off in pre-workshop videos and/or readings: Find (or create) instructional videos or documents, that cover each of the learning outcomes in order to prepare participants to successfully engage in the active-learning activities during the workshop. Keep in mind that:
- Pre-workshop videos or readings reduce the amount of lecture time required in the face-to-face portion of the workshop.
- The instructional differentiation pre-class videos provide is particularly helpful when workshop participants bring with them different levels of knowledge and experience. Those with more experience can skim through the videos, while those will less experience can watch the videos more than once. In the case of students with comprehension issues, they can turn on closed-captioning and watch the video multiple times if desired (McCue, 2016).
- Platforms for distributing text documents include learning management systems, web pages, and Google Docs. These are all tools that can be used to quickly and easily share pre-workshop instructional materials.
- For each video or document you find to put in the Instructor’s Outline Template, please provide the following:
- Learning outcome letter(s) - This helps you quickly see which learning outcomes you have not covered.
- Video title
- Approximate viewing or reading time
- URL of the video or document
E.G.
[C, D] TinkerCAD Keyboard Shortcuts (2 min) - http://bit.ly/2KgQAPA
[__] _____________ (_ min) - ________
[__] _____________ (_ min) - ________
[__] _____________ (_ min) - ________
[__] _____________ (_ min) - ________
[__] _____________ (_ min) - ________
Good job! Time to move on to teaching tips and scheduling a trial run for your workshop.