What Is a CourseFlow Activity

The Activity level breaks down an individual lesson, project, or assessment into individual tasks, providing the smallest level of granularity. This can be particularly important for complex Activities such as those using Active Learning, allowing you to easily visualize the flow of your activity, how students interact with each other, and in what sort of tasks they are engaging. 

The Activity level describes the following components and decisions: 

• Who is doing these tasks (students or the teacher)
• Where these tasks take place (outside of or inside of class)
• What the student will be doing and in which context (sequence of tasks used to engage students such as discussing, problem solving, or reading, and whether these tasks will be done individually, in groups, or as a whole class)
  
  

Note: click here to better understand the relationship between the activity, the course and program levels.

Role of Nodes, Sections, and Columns

At the activity level, nodes represent individual tasks completed by either students or the instructor (or other parties). The columns categorize these nodes based on the location (out of class or in class) and whose tasks they are (student or instructor). The sections allow the activity to be broken into clearly defined parts, but a single part is usually sufficient. At this level of granularity, which most often represents a classroom activity, tasks are generally done consecutively, and are by default linked together by arrows to form a flowchart - this feature can be toggled in the edit menu by clicking a node.

It is at the activity level that it becomes most useful to categorize nodes according to the type of task and context: a number of categories are available and can be selected by clicking the node to edit it. The Task type is used to determine what kind of action students are engaging in, such as problem solving or discussion. The Context gives social information: whether students are working individually, in groups, or as a whole class. These show up on your nodes as icons, allowing you to quickly and visually assess how your activity implements different social groupings (are students always working on their own, or do they spend time working with peers?) and how varied the tasks are (do students always just problem solve, or do they have an opportunity to discuss?).