Course Activities

November 18, 2022

At the core of VidaNovaVLE™ is a powerful and comprehensive LMS that offers an extensive list of activities with which instructors and learners can interact. The flexibility provided by these activities is vast, empowering institutions to capture and deliver content in ways most health sciences education platforms cannot. Some of the activities supported within VidaNovaVLE™ are:

Assignments

Learners can submit work, as individuals or groups, to their instructors for grading. Submissions can be anything from the text entered directly into VidaNovaVLE™ to uploaded files. They can be graded through simple percentage grades, custom scales, or more complex rubrics created by the instructor. Submissions can be annotated in-line and downloaded, a grade can be entered, and individual feedback provided.

Video Conferencing

Instructors can create links to real-time online classrooms by specifying conference times, and VidaNovaVLE™ will add conferences to the course calendar for easy access.

Chat

Instructors and learners can have a real-time synchronous discussion via an accessible interface.

Choice

Instructors can pose a question with options that learners can select. Learners can choose one or more options and update their choices if permitted. Choices can be helpful as a quick poll to foster thinking about a topic, enable the class to vote on a course direction, or gauge progress and understanding.

Database

Instructors and learners can build, share, and search a bank of entries about any potential topic. The format and structure of the entries are highly flexible and support many different entry types, including images, files, URLs, numbers, and text. Instructors can make various fields in the entry, such as checkboxes, dropdown menus, and text fields, optional or required to capture particular data points about each entry. Optionally, the instructor can approve entries before they are added to the database for others to see.

Feedback

Administrators and instructors can create and conduct surveys to gather feedback; this activity is ideal for course and faculty evaluations. Unlike the Survey activity, it enables instructors to write questions freely instead of choosing from a question bank, and unlike the Quiz/Exam activities, ungraded questions can be created.

Forum

Learners and instructors can exchange thoughts and ideas by posting comments as a thread. Learners can include files such as images and other media in their posts. Instructors can choose to grade or rate forum posts, and students can be permitted to rate each other’s posts. Optional settings can be configured, such as engagement start/end dates or requiring students to post and reply to a particular number of other posts before their activity is considered complete.

Glossary

Instructors can create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary for learner reference. They can open the activity to learners to use as a collaborative exercise. Optionally, the instructor can approve glossary entries before addition, learners can be permitted to comment on entries, and the ratings can be pushed as a grade based on instructor preferences to the Gradebook.

H5P activity

Instructors can easily add H5P content created either in VidaNovaVLE™’s content bank, on h5p.com, or another H5P creation app to a course or session as an activity with ease.

Lesson

Instructors can create branching exercises or modules where learners consume content and, depending on their answers to questions within the lesson, are directed to specific content, thereby permitting adaptive learning. Options include setting a time restriction, adding a progress bar, showing a table of contents or hiding navigation, requiring a minimum grade, permitting retakes, and much more!

(LTI) External tool

Learners can interact with LTI-compliant learning resources and activities from other providers/sites and have their grades sent back to VidaNovaVLE™’s Gradebook feature.

Quiz

Instructors can design quizzes/exams, which can be automatically marked while controlling when to provide feedback to learners. This activity supports many different assessment models, including self-assessment tasks with detailed feedback. Instructors even have the option to permit certainty-based marking, which helps learners become better judges of their areas of mastery and uncertainty. Instructors can choose to give general feedback, specific feedback on each question, and overall feedback on a learner’s final score.

SCORM

Instructors can include SCORM or AICC packages as course and session content.

Survey

Instructors can deliver verified survey tools, including Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES) and Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey (ATTLS). These tools are proven to assess and stimulate learning in online or hybrid teaching.

Wiki

Instructors can set up wikis for their learners as a collaborative activity to work with others on a group project or shared lecture notes or as an individual activity to create a personal notebook. All edits to a wiki are visible and reversible.

Workshop

Instructors can use this robust peer assessment activity that permits learners to upload their submissions for distribution across their peers for peer assessment using a grading scale specified by their instructor.

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VidaNovaVLE™’s LMS core supports everything a higher education/health science education institution needs to deliver and assess its curriculum in engaging ways. Several of these activities, such as assignments, workshops, lessons, quizzes, and others, communicate their grades to the Gradebook.

Stay tuned for our feature focus next week, where we’ll take a closer look at the exhaustive options available in VidaNovaVLE™’s Gradebook! In the meantime, be sure to sign-up for updates here.