Teaching and Learning Resource Center

Branching activity

Definition

An activity designed to increase interactivity in online courses through the use of branching, multi-choice narratives. These branching activities are akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure™ series of gamebooks, requiring learners to make decisions from a preselected flowchart of choices. Often, the activity will present a scenario followed by a decision point that branches into different pathways and eventually leads to specific end points based upon the choices that students make along the way. These activities increase interactivity and student engagement, transform passive learning activities into active learning experiences, reinforce and apply information that students have learned, and provide self-paced, customized learning.