4 All Together Now: Structured Renewable Assignments
Structured Renewable Assignments bring together these three bodies of design knowledge into one design practice. As with most design/engineering areas, multiple elements of scientific theory and experiment are brought together here to create a single practice – as aircraft design/engineering brings together understandings of lift, thrust, velocity, and other areas of physics.
I am not claiming that Structured Renewable Assignments are as theoretically well understood or empirically supported as aircraft engineering, just that in the messiness of learning design, discarding one piece of an interlocking practice is as problematic as discarding lift from a consideration of aircraft engineering. In order to be a structured renewable assignment, an assignment must be relatively high structure, must be renewable, and must call on the learner to be active.
Theoretically, maximizing the efficacy of each of these elements will maximize the efficacy of the whole.
Examples of Structured Renewable Assignments
- A peer review assignment with a detailed rubric, where learners evaluate contributions to an open textbook.
- An annotation assignment where students add open annotations.
- Students taking roles to co-write two paragraphs in an open textbook.
- Learners submitting brief glossary entries to an open glossary, and receiving detailed feedback on their submissions.
- Learners contributing questions and distractor choices to an open question bank for quizzes and tests, with a detailed guide on how to construct questions and distractor choices.