Innovative Learning & Teaching

Use Active Learning Techniques

Introduction

Although we frequently hear the phrase “active learning” in educational circles, perhaps the best way to think of active learning in the classroom is to focus on learning processes rather than on learning products. Active learning redefines classroom practice from a static view of learning in which knowledge is poured into the passive, empty minds of student learners to a more dynamic view where, through project-based, collaborative, and problem-based activities, students play a more vital role in creating new knowledge to be applied to other professional and academic contexts. Proponents of active learning include the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who discouraged a “banking education” model in which teachers deposited knowledge into students' minds for students to dispense at test time in the same way we deposit money into a checking account. Technology can play an important role in ensuring that learning is the result of dialogue and production of new knowledge in new media for audiences beyond the classroom, making both course content and student work more relevant.

Relevance

Although active learning projects focus on student roles and responsibilities, their impact on the role of the instructor is equally important. Instructors who embrace active learning find themselves moving away from the traditional lecture or test that evaluates static knowledge of facts and concepts and privileged one-way conversation between teacher and student to instead develop more interactive relationships with their students that foreground collaboration and real-world application. Such activities ensure that learning is a “two-way street.” Innovative examples integrating active learning across the curriculum are below.

• The Institute for Law School Teaching, Gonzaga University, Washington contains an inventory for determining how prepared students, faculty, and institutions are integrating active learning.

• A collaborative project in active learning and web-technology involving Indiana University, Purdue Univeristy at Indianapolis, The United States Air Force Academy and Davidson College, Just In-Time Teaching or JiTT encourages both self-paced and collaborative learning projects that allow teachers to construct lessons and activities based on the results of these formative student assessments. For more details, the JiTT has both a Just-In Time Teaching web site and a book Just in Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Technology , by Gregor M. Novak, Evelyn T. Patterson, Andrew D. Gavrin, and Wolfgang Christian (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).

• The Learning Technology Consortium is group of nine universities dedicated to sharing best practices and resources for teaching and learning with technology. As part of this idea-sharing practice, they published Teaching with Technology: Seventy-five Professors from Eight Universities Tell Their Stories (Ed. David Brown, Anker Publishing, 2000).

• The League of Innovation in the Community College emphasizes the relationship between teaching, learning, and technology and the community college experience through its annual conference on Information Technology , as well as resources that include their collection Taking a Big Picture Look @ Technology, Learning, and the Community College (Mark David Milliron and Cindy L. Miles, 2000), which includes survey research, case studies, and adminstrator testimonials about the impact of technology on student retention and success.

Active learning works because its goal is simple: To move students from passive recipients to motivated participants through more contextualized, hands-on teaching activities. These activities vary from cooperative learning, to project-based learning, to case studies and service learning. For more information about some of these approaches, please see the section on Developing Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students. Active learning works because it transcends curriculum; strategies can work in chemistry, engineering, business, education, and the humanities, just to name a few disciplines. Finally, active learning works because it allows for students to assess their own role in their learning processes. Charles Bonwell is a nationally recognized Active Learning Scholar and co-author with James Eisen of Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom (ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, 1991) and co-editor (with Tracey Sutherland) of Using Active Learning in College Classes: A Range of Options for Faculty (Jossey Bass, 1996). Bonwell's Active Learning Site contains both bibliographies and active learning research summaries.

Principle in Practice

Asynchronous bulletin boards and real-time chats are among the common ways to move a hybrid or fully online class from passive listeners to active participants. Other options include web-based research projects that call for critical evaluation of sources, real-world case studies from interactive CD-ROMs or online textbooks, and the use of technology to help students produce new knowledge in new forms, including web sites, video clips, PowerPoint presentations and much more. Keep in mind, however, that technology is not enough; it requires a shift in instructional design and delivery to turn your classroom into an active learning community.

• The computer interface comes with built-in assumptions about what values and which people are important. Special concern needs to be taken to make interfaces as widely participatory as possible. One strategy is to require all students to take an online learning styles inventory to determine the ways they typically learn better: Verbally, visually, aurally, kinesthetically. Have them share the results with peers online, and help them use the results to better assess what elements of your course, or of e-learning in general, meet their learning needs. Use such information as a formative course assessment, re-designing when possible. A popular learning styles inventory is Neil Fleming’s VARK.

• A common instructional mode is the PowerPoint lecture in which the teacher highlights the main points of a textbook chapter or other course content for students to review in class or for later online access. Share the responsibility of student learning by having students prepare their own mini-lecture/presentations of course content through PowerPoint, preferably as a group, and then sharing those resources online. Such an activity moves students from passive to active learning, becoming co-facilitators in the process. More detail about the role PowerPoint can play in active learning strategies is available through a tutorial   from University of Minnesota 's Center for Teaching and Learning Services.

• Online communities do not exist by sheer virtue of the technology or by putting a group of people together online. Rather, communities must be nurtured in a way that involves the equal collaboration between teachers and students. The following are strategies for fostering more active engagement in online discussion.

• Assign Roles and Responsibilities to Students: Rather than being the “sage on the stage,” invest students with the authority and responsibility to moderate discussions, respond to questions by peers. This makes knowledge-making in the virtual classroom a collaborative, social act. In addition, this process helps to foster online decision-making in problem-based learning or case study activities for those students who are not as experiences working collaboratively online.

• Structure Activitities that Require Reporting Back to the Larger Group: Depending on the assignment, e.g., case studies, peer review, reading responses, it is important to have smaller groups report back to the instructor as well as the whole class about their progress, questions, and results. This validates the collaborative work students have done by making them accountable for the dissemination of new knowledge.

• Online discussions require careful planning to avoid the “ping-pong” effect in which students respond only to instructor prompts. Structure dialogue in ways that allow incremental and increasing critical patterns of student interaction with each other and with the course content, including:
• Initial Instructor or Facilitator Prompt
• Initial Student Responses
• Response to Peers
• New Conversation Threads
• Reflection and Synthesis

• Chatrooms, Discussion Boards, MOOs (Multiple Object-Oriented Environments), BLOGS, etc., have become core elements of many online courses. Many educators consider such elements the answer to past criticism that online education lacked student interaction. Yet it is important to determine what types of interaction can take place in these synchronous and asynchronous environments and to establish a variety of interactions, so that all students are able to speak, listen, and be heard. Strategies: Structure a range of possible communication interactions that enhance your curriculum and meet students’ scheduling and learning needs as individuals and as a whole: Bulletin boards for more in-depth discussions of readings; small group chats to brainstorm topic ideas or virtual debates among smaller groups of students; virtual office hours in real-time. Archive conversations to allow for further reflection and follow-up. Also allow for non-computer interactions, including telephone time, fax, and in some cases, face-to-face meetings among students and between instructor and students.

• Construct discipline and project-specific WebQuests. According to WebQuest developer Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University, "A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation." For more information and examples of WebQuests, visit the WebQuest page at San Diego State University.
  

Assessing the Benefits

Active learning encourages assessment throughout the course rather than at the end and recognizes the importance of self-assessment. This can include bulletin board postings at mid-term to assess students’ perceptions of performance, and individual and group progress reports, to help instructors to know what role they should play in helping students be more successful. Because so many students are creating online projects for the first time, a “portfolio” assessment approach also helps showcase students’ development, again focusing on processes and not just on graded papers or tests. Additional assessment resources are below.

• Flashlight: According to Flashlight founder Stephen Ehrmann, the activities Flashlight tools and resources should assess were in fact similar to Chickering and Gamson's original Seven Principles for Good Undergraduate Practice.

• For more discussion of the goals of Flashlight, see a recent interview with Stephen Ehrmann at Distance-Educator.com.

• Both the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) and the American Association of Higher Education have partnered to create a virtual community of practice for those interested in the role of electronic portfolios in fostering learner centered assessment. For more information, visit the NILI/Educause description of the project .

For More Information

• The Worchester Polytechnic Institute Academic Technology Center hosts a site that provides descriptions of active learning strategies and how they can be implemented online.
• Donald R. Paulson and Jennifer L. Faust of the Chemistry and Philosophy Departments at California State University, Los Angeles have a website on Active and Cooperative Learning and the College Classroom that includes a list of tips and a comprehensive bibliography.
• Cleveland State University 's Center for Teaching and Learning provides a list of 101 Things You Can Do the First Four Weeks of Class , with tips 69 through 91 focusing on encouraging active learning.
• The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory's online resource Active Learning with Technology is primarily aimed at professional development for K through 12 teachers; however, many of its resources are useful to educators at all levels of the curriculum.
• The Engineering Education department at Arizona State University has developed a comprehensive website about active or cooperative learning.
• Katy Campbell at the University of Alberta 's Academic Technologies for Learning has developed an online handbook for web design and active learning.
• Additional strategies for successful online teaching and learning learning can be found in Donald E. Hanna, et al. 147 Practical Tips for Teaching Online Groups: Essentials of Web-Based Education. Madison, WI: Atwood, 2000.

Looking Ahead

As colleges and universities determine the varied modes of instructional delivery required to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, it is clear that the “lecture as usual” isn't going to transition well into hybrid classrooms that combine face-to-face and online learning and change the role of teacher from expert to facilitator. While many educators have taken the plunge into technology-based teaching, the difficulty is that the technology advances so quickly that today's teachers can hardly keep themselves afloat. Some of these new technologies are listed below.

• Blogs: The most current issue of T.H.E. Journal features “Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere' ,” an article by Richard E. Ferdig and Kaye D. Trammell at the University of Florida that outlines the role of weblogs in promoting active learning.
• Both Blogs and Wikis (interactive websites that can be collectively updated) are featured in a two-part series, “We-Learning: Social Software and E-Learning” by Eva Kaplan-Leiserson, for Learning Circuits.
• PDAs: Online resources abound about the role of PDAs across the curriculum. The TLT Group website features a report by Betty L. Black and Marianne Niedzlek-Feaver at North Carolina State University on the benefits of PDAs in the zoology curriculum, “Assessment of a Handheld Computing Initiative.”
  

The Ohio Learning Network would like to thank Content Specialist Kristine L. Blair for thoughtfully gathering and organizing the content about this Principle.