Active Learning

Broadly speaking, learning experiences are all the tasks and activities you assign your students during your course: readings, videos, lectures, discussions, quizzes, problems, case studies, projects, papers, etc. During the backwards design process described in Part 2 you will have selected the types of learning experiences you are going to include in your course based on your learning objectives. The next step is to specify precisely what these learning experiences will consist of and how the they will be presented to the student. For didactic content -- readings, videos, lectures -- this is relatively straightforward. Other experiences need to be designed more deliberately to facilitate the learning you are trying to achieve for your students. Your instructional designer will encourage you, and work with you, to apply an active learning approach as you design your learning experiences.

Effective Active Learning

An active learning experience is one that requires the student to actively work with new knowledge rather than being a passive consumer of information. This means using newly acquired information to solve a problem or tackle a challenge. The challenge can take many forms -- it can be as simple as a discussion or as complex as doing a project that simulates a real-world problem in the profession being studied.

In order for active learning to be effective, the following ingredients are essential:

1. The challenge presented to the student must be genuine and meaningful.
2. The challenge must be level appropriate and require understanding and not simply memorization.
3. The student must feel "safe to fail". Learning occurs by embracing a problem which is difficult to solve and where mistakes are likely.
4. When they make mistakes, the student must receive timely feedback that directs them towards, but does not give away, the ideal solution.

Watch the video below for a deeper dive into active learning and the research that supports it.