Content as a Verb

In An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching by Jim Henry and Jeff Meadows, they discuss a second principle of content as a verb. Their idea is that students are not merely presented content for reading and review, but students can contribute to the content of the course. Students learn more effectively online when they are actively engaged in dialogues with the instructor and interact with fellow classmates. The instructor is encouraged to create tasks and assignments that fulfill the course objectives, but engage the students in the learning process.

For example, if one of my course objectives is for students to write clear and concise thesis statements for a position paper, I would present some poorly written thesis statements and ask the students to comment on what they thought the paper was about. Most likely they will comment that they do not know. Then I would have the students write and post their own proposed thesis statement (one sentence) on a D2L forum or a blog. I would also post some models of good thesis statements. The students would read each other's thesis statements and make comments like the statement is too broad, too narrow for the assignment's length, not parallel, or is clear. I would also make comments on the statements to facilitate the comments. Hopefully the students would receive some good feedback as to what they need to change to make their thesis clearer.

If one of my course objectives is for students to learn to research, then I would pose a question to them like why is it important to learn to read. They would have to find an article, summarize its contents, and explain why they agree (or disagree) with the article. These 500 word responses would then be posted in the class forum. Next I would ask each student to reply to another student's response. They could add more researched material if they needed to. The class could perhaps even write a lengthy paper together in a wiki if another class objective was to learn how to collaborate with other students.

Keeping in mind that content is a verb, an action or an activity, when teaching an online course would help me stayed focused on creating tasks that engage the students rather than just spoonfeeding them the writing process.