Course Learning Activities & Weekly Activity Structure
Food and Water Security is an instructor-facilitated course with the following learning activity types:
- Knowledge acquisition by viewing/reading through the following content resources:
- Mini-lectures delivered by the course creator, who is also the instructor in this course.
- Curated readings, which include materials developed by the instructor and external articles (e.g., news sources, journal articles, web pages from reliable sources).
- Curated videos from selected organizations and individuals (publicly available via social media channels or organizational websites).
- Optional video and reading sources.
- Embedded self-assessments: graded surveys/mini-quizzes woven into the content to check your understanding.
- Substantive Question/Answer Discussion: A weekly discussion topic that engages you in a dialogue with your colleagues. Typically, the discussion will require you to have read/viewed particular content, undertake a small activity and contribute a short discussion post. You will be asked to discuss module topics further with your colleagues, incorporating additional ideas from the readings.
- Module reflection: a weekly assignment that prompts you to reflect back upon each module content and then, and summarize your key understandings in a final submitted reflection.
We’ve designed this course with a particular activity pattern in mind as illustrated in Figure GS-8 below:
Each module launches with a brief overview, followed by the first content block. It is important to complete this first content block prior to Thursday as this content will serve as the background for the weekly discussion. We recommend you focus on the second content block in the latter half of the week for deeper understandings of key theories and activities.
