Monday, January 31, 2011

hidden choices

Often e-learning courses have practice quiz inside the course. These quiz are of various kinds: drag and drop, match the following or plain multiple choice questions. Since the
Choices are explicit and visible the learner can guesstimate the correct answer a lot of times. A better way to design such an exercise would be to keep choices "hidden". For example I am building a course on data privacy where I show an office cubicle to the learner and ask him to click on objects from where data loss can happen. There are 15 objects in the screen from where data pilferage can happen and 8 are "spoilers" or objects that have no impact in data loss. But none of these items are highlighted in the scene. The overall impact is that learner has to think and draw from his experience and limited knowledge and in that "stretch" of thinking he learns. In not making the choices visible and explicit and keeping them "hidden" we make the learner think harder and deeper about the content and learn consequently. So what do you think? Is this method of "hiding" choices useful? Have you tried something similiar?

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