Have you got some "offline" activities as part of your course that you want to be able to easily keep track of? For instance you might have workbook questions, textbook annotations, physical skills, progress towards a project or assignment?
You can make use of tasks in a simple way to quickly get an idea of where learners as a whole are at.
The image below shows how you're quickly able to scan to see which tasks learners still need to attempt.
In the rest of the article, we'll look at a few different approaches you could take.
Disclaimer
Keep in mind that in many of the examples we're bending the multiple-choice task to suit our purposes a little. So though it looks sort of like a checkbox, it's really a multiple-choice in disguise, so it functions like a multiple-choice. We can still make this useful for our purposes, just keep the limitations of this use in mind.
As one checklist
In this example we use a multiple-choice to function as a single checklist of things learners need to complete offline.
Note: If learners complete the items at different times, they need to remember to resubmit the "checklist" each time.
Having the list all in the one task keeps the task list for learners short and it's a little easier-on-the-eye in the page itself.
However, in the note above, you'll see it has a slight downside if you're expecting learners to need to complete this checklist over multiple sittings. If that's the case, you might choose to break up the checklist as below.
As separate tasks
Having the items as separate tasks can give the facilitator a little more easy-to-access visibility over exactly which parts of a list have been completed (as in the first image in this article). So this approach might suit checklist tasks that will be completed over a longer period of time or are more complex.
As separate tasks with checklists
If you think learners' motivation might be increased if they get to tick off sub-items, but you'd like the facilitator to have the greater visibility of tasks, you could even combine the two approaches, by listing the sub-tasks as a checklist.
This approach might also help if you think learners might need more direction to not miss a step etc.
As a more active task
Of course, in all the examples above, all that we're requiring of learners is that they say they've done it. You might choose to make the task more active if....
you'd prefer evidence that they've done the thing
you think learners would be more engaged being active
you think learners would benefit from meta-cognition or reflection
learner workload isn't too high (because these active tasks will require more effort from learners).
Below are just a few examples of how you could connect your offline activities to a more active online task.
Example 1 - Evidence
You could also do a similar task to example 1 with an audio or video upload instead. Where they explain their notes/talk through their working etc. etc.
Example 2 - Elaboration
You could ask simpler (or rather, less onerous) tasks getting learners to practice new definitions they've learned. See Active learning – Definitions for a whole host of example tasks for practicing definitions.
Example 3 - meta-cognition and/or reflection
It's likely you won't want to use this approach for all tasks (or overuse it) but it can be beneficial for more complex tasks or as learners are preparing for revision and/or assessment.
Summary
Just because learners are doing things offline or out of iQualify, doesn't mean you can't incorporate (and keep track of) it in your online course. There is a whole range of options, depending on your learners and context - from a simple checklist, to more active and even reflective learning.