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Practical Sessions

Practical sessions are represented by hands-on activities that learners perform in order to acquire experience. These activities are typically supervised by an educator who proposes the practical exercises and evaluates the learner's performance. The purpose of the evaluation is mainly to provide feedback as opposed to grading the learner.

Instances of practical sessions are represented by lab sessions, seminars, or workshops. The format of a practical session may include:

  • theoretical explanations and practical examples offered by the educator
  • practical activities performed by the learners
  • debates and discussions between learners and educator or between learners themselves regarding specific topics
  • feedback from the educator or peers

Educator preference, institutional recommendations and implementation specifics dictate:

  • which types of practical sessions are used
  • the length of a practical session instance
  • the format of a practical session

As such, the educational materials used as support for the practical sessions should offer the flexibility of being tailored depending on the educator's needs. At the same time, they should be usable in the absence of an educator as standalone learning materials for self-taught individuals that want to learn by themselves.

A practical session comprises of a series of topics that the learner must assimilate. A topic must contain:

  • a brief theoretical description (which may contain links to broader explanations) by using reading content, media, and, potentially, slides materials
  • one or more practical exemplifications of the described topic with demos from guides
  • one or more tutorials from guides content, where the learner makes the first steps in applying the described topic
  • one or more quizzes from questions regarding some aspects of what has been presented so far
  • one or more tasks where the learner applies the presented topic

There is no enforcement on the order in which the above content types should appear in the topic layout because that depends on the nature of the presented topic. However, we do recommend that the content types are mingled together so that the learner's attention is kept alive. For example, having a large theoretical description or a large demo may bore some learners. To avoid that, questions, tasks and tutorials may be sprinkled throughout the topic layout to ensure more engagement.

Ideally, each practical activity (tutorial, question, task) should be automatically evaluated and feedback should be instantly generated. Depending on the activity type, the difficulty of achieving this might vary. A question, for instance, is easy to grade automatically, by its very design. However, most practical sessions probably do not consist solely of questions, but include more complex activities, such as tasks. A task can be verified automatically in some cases (for example a programming task that has an automated checker), while in other cases it might be very hard to do so (for example in a math proof or an essay).

The number of topics and the ordering in which the topics are presented in a practical session is highly dependent on the nature of the field of study and the preference of the educator. As a consequence, we do not have any recommendations regarding this aspect. However, if the content creator develops materials that have dependencies between them, this should be specified.