Techniques & tools for supporting independent work

Authors recommend techniques such as providing learners with guidelines and/or prompts to list subtasks needed to complete a larger task, the resources and tools needed to complete each subtask, and ways to prioritize each subtask by importance to achieving the goal. They recommend offering learners tools for allocating a time budget for each task and ways to update time budgets when found to be unrealistic. To the extent that managers and instructors know the typical time required to complete tasks, they should offer estimates to employees and learners. Finally, the authors recommend providing supports and tools to help with task scheduling, primarily by helping employees and learners to differentiate “working” and “free” time in their daily and weekly calendars.

From Nawrot, I., & Doucet, A. (2014, April). Building engagement for MOOC students: introducing support for time management on online learning platforms. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 1077-1082). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery.