Short Description:
Provide an active and engaging experience for learners.
Instructors who use a variety of evidenced-based teaching strategies create an environment for increased student engagement and critical thinking.
Details for Implementation
If active learning is new to you, START WITH ONE NEW TECHNIQUE at a time. The more you make active learning a part of your routine, the more confident you will be in incorporating new practices.
Choose from one of these simple, evidence-based approaches to get started:
A common fear is that the online classroom doesn’t lend itself to active learning in the same way that a face-to-face classroom does. While it may look a little different or be asynchronous, you can use active learning in your online course just as you would in your face-to-face course – you just might have to make a few tweaks to get there!
The Active Learning Strategies by Instructional Modality handout includes ideas for active learning in remote-synchronous and asynchronous online classes.
Use the self-reflection rubric as you consider your own teaching practice and use of instructional strategies. Download the file to get started.
Active learning is an umbrella term and generally means teaching and learning that is not traditional lecture (in which students are passively learning). Active learning asks students to:
- grapple with content,
- engage in problem-solving,
- explore and interrogate their thinking, and
- frequently work with peers to co-create meaning.
In other words, students construct their own knowledge. This is not to say that lecture is bad! Rather, lectures can be enhanced with active learning (Zakrajsek, 2018). For instance, in a traditional lecture, an instructor might tell students all the details of a cycle. In an active learning lecture, an instructor might tell students the starting point of a cycle (lecture) ask them to predict the steps in order (active learning), reveal the correct information (lecture), and then have students capture their misconceptions, new clarified knowledge, and questions (active learning).
Active learning techniques such as chunking content and providing students adequate time to reflect on course content and class materials produces responses that demonstrate a depth of thought and learning not seen in traditional lecture classrooms (Rowe, 1974). Active learning is a proven strategy that enhances learning and effectively addresses student engagement (Freeman et al., 2014; Haak et al., 2011; Prince, 2004). Students not only report higher levels of satisfaction and engagement in active learning classrooms (Armbruster, 2009), they also show increased academic performance and persistence (Freeman et al., 2014). This is especially true with students from historically marginalized groups (Haak et al., 2011).
The instructor plays an essential role in carefully designing active learning experiences that are aligned with course objectives and help students progress and deepen their understanding by selecting relevant content, providing expert coaching during learning activities, and giving feedback. Leveraging active learning in this way teaches self-regulated learning and helps students develop and use metacognitive skills that increase learning and retention (Fountain, 2012; Nilson, 2014).