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Students who actively engage with learning materials, for example by completing more practice activities, show better learning outcomes. A straightforward step to stimulate this desirable behavior is to require students to complete activities and downplay the role of reading materials. However, this approach might have undesirable consequences, such as inflating the number of activities completed in a short period of time until maximum performance is achieved ("gaming the system"). In this paper, we analyze the relative benefits of completing activities vs. readings for learning outcomes in an online course that required students to perform practice activities. The results show that students who read more pages have better learning outcomes than students who completed more activities. This pattern of results holds even when considering different measures of active engagement but is reversed when considering only activities classified as effective active engagement by a