Interactivity with Raptivity

Student interaction with content and instructor is a core teaching principle and highly related to successful online learning. At the same time, faculty have limited time to design and develop interactive learning activities, and even less time for providing individual student performance feedback on those activities. Fortunately, technology can be used to provide some types of interaction. Interactivity is a term sometimes used interchangeably with interaction, but it is usually refers to situations where a person is interacting with a computer.

1. Apply course content using branching simulations and case studies.
2. Teach simple and complex procedures with sequencing activities and interactive flow charts.
3. Present interrelated ideas through interactive diagrams.
4. Develop conceptual understanding through example classification exercises.
5. Help memorize facts, paired associations, and other declarative knowledge using electronic flashcards and matching games.

What are some exciting and useful capabilities of interactivity?

• MERLOT, HEAL, and MedEdPortal are searchable online repositories of educational games, simulations, and animations, which instructors have developed and shared for others to use.
• Quia is an inexpensive, easy-to-use online service for developing and hosting educational games and activities.
• Raptivity is more advanced tool that uses templates to develop educational games, interactive diagrams, and simulations with hundreds of variations.
• Some interactivities can be imported into ANGEL as SCORM objects and connected to the ANGEL grade book to track student use and performance.

How do I begin using this service?

Contact TLT (tlt@kumc.edu) to get started. We are available to review your courses, and we can assist you with finding areas in your course where interactive learning activities could be helpful to your students. Additionally:

• We can help you use MERLOT, HEAL, and MedEdPortal to find existing learning activities.
• We can help you use Quia and Raptivity to develop your own activities. The Raptivity program can be used at the TLT offices (G010 Wahl West) or in 1033 Dykes Library.
• Because Raptivity is an advanced development tool, we can also help develop activities for you.

Additional online resources for this service:

1. Enter Active Learning: Adding Interactivity to Your Online Courses
2. Raptivity Community Forums
3. Raptivity Healthcare Samples

For more information about this service, contact Teaching & Learning Technologies (TLT) at (913) 588-7107 or tlt@kumc.edu.