Are you building an activity or a presentation?

A question that instructional designers need to ask early in every project is: Are you building an activity or are you building a presentation?

And this is important for a number of reasons but the biggest one is that we shouldn’t try to fool ourselves. If we are building a presentation then we should build a great and engaging presentation. And if we are building an activity then we need to make sure our students are actively engaging with the materials.

And finally if you’re building a presentation, don’t feel bad about it, just be sure that you want to be doing a presentation and the decision is intentional.