Order of Operations: Online Course
Building on my 3-Column Table and UbD outline, I wanted to create an online mini-course for order of operations. This course primarily has two types of student in mind, a student preparing to go to college trying to “brush up” rather than take developmental education classes or a non-traditional student who needs a refresher.
Because of that, the course takes a little extra time looking at the concept from different angles with some fun analogies and exercises. Then, having established the need for order of operations, the next module goes into explaining order of operations on a more technical level–the way students have likely heard it before–before moving on to sets of practice problems so the student can try and self-assess.
A final, ungraded quiz helps students assess whether they are ready to move on or not. Finally, then, the last module connects the current mini-course on to another, related skill. It introduces the FOIL method, which is related to order of operations and can help bridge the student into further algebraic concepts.
There are many other subjects which would be good to cover with mini-courses like this. In looking at Stigler, Givvin, and Thompson’s (2009) research, the two most commonly missed types of problems related to fractions (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, mixed with other whole or decimal numbers) and least common multiple/greatest common denominator. Both of those seem like good candidates for a course of this type.
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