Enhancing learning with practice and assessment

You can’t learn to swim in a library; you have to get in the water and practice. Similarly, your learners need opportunities to practice what you’re teaching them and assess their skills. 

With Udemy, you can actively engage learners using interactive learning content in two key ways: 

• Learning activities: learn-by-doing opportunities, like coding exercises and practice tests
• Assessments: opportunities like quizzes that allow learners to gauge whether they’ve met their learning objectives

The most successful courses typically incorporate a mix of interactive learning activities, tailoring each one to the real-world context of the skill they’re teaching. 

While practice activities and assessments aren’t required, including them improves the quality of your course and often results in higher learner satisfaction and course reviews. Learning science tells us that learners learn best by doing, validating their learning, receiving feedback on their work, and reflecting on what they’ve learned. Also, our research finds that learners value practice and are more likely to choose courses with interactive learning activities.

 

Incorporate interactive learning content into your courses

Adding elements like quizzes, assignments, coding exercises, and practice tests to your course enlightens and engages learners. Plus, we highlight your interactive features on your course landing page, helping learners find the right course for them. If your course is included in UB, these can also contribute to your ratings and bottom line as time spent on them contributes to your consumption metrics. Udemy lets you create many types of interactive content, including: 

• Quizzes are a series of simple multiple-choice questions to reinforce the understanding of your content that are easy to set up. A good quiz question should require the learner to demonstrate real comprehension of the material. A good solution should provide a detailed explanation for the answer.
• Practice tests are formative assessments intended to mirror a certification exam experience for learners as they complete a course (or take a practice test only course). They provide learners with opportunities to practice test-taking strategies, understand their exam readiness, and help them decide what to work on next in preparation to take a certification exam. They also give you the opportunity to provide scalable feedback on learners’ work so that learners can improve their readiness for the certification exams. See our guide to creating great practice tests.
• Coding exercises are a way for learners to practice a particular coding language or framework. Learners are able to check their understanding of a concept covered in your course through automated grading. Check out our guide to creating great coding exercises.
• Assignments: With an assignment, you give learners a task to complete on their own, such as a personal reflection, a photo editing prompt, or a case study. Learners submit their work for you or their peers to review, and evaluate themselves against a standard you provide. 
• Supplemental activities: If you have an activity in mind, but it doesn’t fit into one of these formats, you can always deliver instructions via video, with a file attachment like a PDF, or on a secondary learning site (so long as it’s free and doesn’t require signup). Worksheets, peer conversation prompts, simple games, and other activities can all be effectively delivered this way. Bear in mind that learners who access your course through a company subscription may not be able to access downloadable materials or activities on 3rd party websites.

 

Plan your interactive learning activities

When integrating interactive learning into your course, first consider your learning objectives and how interactive learning can help your learners achieve them. 

Decide whether you want to offer learn-by-doing experiences, like as coding exercises, which allow learners to practice a particular coding language or framework, or practice tests, which simulate real-world certification exams. You can also utilize assessment opportunities, like quizzes, to help learners gauge their mastery of the course learning objectives. Or you can combine both approaches for a more comprehensive learning experience

Additionally, consider the following details:

• Placement: Strategically insert activities where they make the most sense to reinforce learning — for example, at the end of a section, or right after a new concept is introduced. Sometimes you can place interactive content at the beginning of a section and then follow with lecture content and other resources to reinforce concepts learners are practicing.
• Labeling: Craft clear titles for your activities that will aid learners in understanding what to expect from your course. Good labels also set the tone for the learning experience and tell learners how the content can be applied to real-world situations.
• Marketability: The total number of practice activities and knowledge checks appears on your course landing page (CLP), and learners can filter to courses that have specific types of interactive learning. Having a variety of interactive elements can help your course stand out.  

 

Creating interactive content

Interactive learning content allows learners the opportunity to learn by doing. Content should meet the following criteria:

• Clearly explained: Offer explicit instructions in both text and video formats, detailing the activity, its purpose, the expected outcomes, and required materials.
• Time-estimated: Give an estimate of the time needed to complete the activity, considering that learners may take longer than you do.
• Well-resourced: Provide materials such as templates, examples, or starter code to facilitate the activity.
• Feedback-enabled: Provide criteria checklists for self-assessment of the activity. When appropriate, encourage learners to seek peer feedback from their community. 

Think about how you offer opportunities for assessments. Assessments are crucial for learners to demonstrate their understanding and for you to gauge the effectiveness of your teaching. They can be formative or summative.

• Formative: Embedded within the course to allow learners to check their understanding and revisit material as needed.
• Summative: Positioned at the end of the course to evaluate the achievement of learning objectives.

 

💡More tips for coding exercises and practice tests

Coding exercises

If you’re teaching development courses, coding exercises are a great way to help your learners put concepts into practice. In fact, when courses have coding exercises we see 90% more enrollments in Udemy Business than comparable courses without them. Here’s an example to demonstrate the learner experience with coding exercises.

For English and Spanish exercises in Python, C++, Java, and Javascript, you can now get some help from third-party artificial intelligence to create your exercise files.

➡️ Get started creating or updating your coding exercise with our in-depth guide. 

Practice tests

When it comes to helping learners prep for their certification exams, practice tests are key. When courses have practice tests, we see 75% more enrollments in Udemy Business than comparable courses without them. Here’s how practice test experience works for learners.

You can easily provide answer explanations for multiple choice and multi-select questions with the help of AI, giving learners who select wrong answers valuable insights and learnings. (Note: available only English development and IT-related courses only for now).

➡️ Get started creating or updating your practice tests with our in-depth guide. 

 

More resources

• Enroll in the official Udemy Course: How to Create an Online Course
• Create a multiple choice quiz
• How to create a practice test 
• Guide to creating great practice tests
• How to create a coding Exercise
• Guide to creating great coding exercises
• How to create assignments
• Adding resources to lectures