Out-of-class Activities: What Have We Been Doing and How We Can Change it for the Future

It is believed that if students are well engaged in the learning process within the classroom, they will continue the learning process independently outside the classroom. To facilitate such out-of-class learning, there is a plethora of traditional techniques with a variety of learning theoretical backgrounds. While out-of-class activities based on these techniques have shown to improve a student’s overall quality of learning, traditional activities lack the supervision, instant feedback, and personalization that the current generation of students expects. With the rising cost of college tuition, many of today’s students are working more hours outside of an educational setting and therefore need more supervision and encouragement than their predecessors. These factors make traditional out-of-class activities not effective to achieve the desired level of student learning and engagement outside the classroom. The faculty needs to rethink ways to redesign traditional out-of-class activities to make these activities more effective for this generation of students. This paper presents a review of the literature on and categorization of traditional out-of-class activities. The paper also discusses the results of a survey of what the faculty is doing to engage and continue student learning outside the classroom. Finally, the paper presents a new way of designing and delivering out-of-class activities that have the potential to increase student engagement with the help of instructional scaffolding, interactive activities, and personalization and adaptation.