Active Learning Strategies

Active learning is a student-centered teaching approach championed for its ability to promote instructor-student and student-student interaction and engagement with course concepts (rather than passive participation). Through immersion in authentic and relevant activities, opportunities for collaboration, and frequent and specific feedback, students are positioned as co-creators of knowledge in the learning environment. Below are several common active learning approaches and considerations that one might adopt in the classroom and beyond.

Flip the Classroom

Flipping the classroom is a student-centered approach to provide learning materials for consumption at their own pace, instead of solely relying on the instructor as a means of learning new information. This can be in the form of reading materials, skill tutorial videos, or even pre-recorded lectures. Flipping the classroom also provides the opportunity to “chunk” information into smaller, more digestible pieces to help improve student retention (ERIC Institution of Education Sciences). 

Drawbacks to Overpreparing

• Create a Document directly inside of Blackboard for quick and easy access to multi-media content.
• Consider using Open Education Resources (OER): materials at little to no cost to students.
• Create your own lecture videos: 
  • Tips for creating effective educational videos (Vanderbilt University).
  • Make sure your videos are effective educational videos (Vanderbilt University).
  • Use the YuJa Video Management System (UTEP Licensed and supported) to record, close-caption, upload, and deploy videos in Blackboard.

Lecture less

Keep lectures short and focused on concepts that students struggle most with. Consider breaking up your lecture into smaller topics, allowing for collaboration and activities to guide students to learn concepts. Or, save class time for activities alone and flip your classroom, requiring short, low-stakes assessments or discussion posts before class to be sure that students come prepared to use what they have learned.

Encourage collaboration

Collaborative/Cooperative learning requires that a student becomes actively engaged in the concepts of the class while teaching them how to value the perspectives and contributions of others as a means of deepening their own understanding.

Some examples of active learning collaboration include:

• Think, pair, share (Kent State University).
• Brainstorming (Northern Illinois University).
• Peer Review (Purdue Online Writing Lab).
• Case Studies (Boston University).
• Problem Solving : an interactive (clickable) guide to teaching problem solving.
• Collaborative learning in digital the digital space : a collection of ideas for online collaboration. 

Encourage Metacognition, Critical, and Creative thinking

Many students do not come to college truly understanding how to think critically about what they learn, how they learn, or how to best use what they learn. Along with the knowledge and skills necessary to be professionally successful, students need guidance to become self-motivated and self-managed in their own learning process. 

• Metacognition is an individual’s knowledge of and ability to control their own learning process and understanding of concepts. Students may not always be aware of these things and can greatly benefit from learning activities that lead them towards self-reflection and self-regulation of the ways they learn best. Learn more about guiding students’ metacognition using this interactive (clickable) guide: Evidence-Based Guide to Student Metacognition.
• Critical thinking skills help students discover solutions to real-world problems , find deeper understanding of important concepts, and question everything they learn. Fostering strong critical thinking in your course can help students be successful throughout their entire lives. Gain a deeper understanding of critical thinking and how to provide the opportunity for students to develop these skills, see Critical Thinking and Problem Solving from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
• Creative thinking skills can be just as important as critical thinking and cognition and represent the highest order of thinking according to the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Creative thinking allows students to explore ideas and concepts by utilizing divergent thinking (brainstorming, concept mapping, etc.) to build on knowledge and learn to use it to creatively solve problems they may face in their personal and professional lives. To learn more about the types of and approaches to creative thinking, explore IDEA’s Developing creative capacities

Provide High-Impact Practices

High Impact Practices (HIPs) are student-centered practices that take students beyond the classroom and into enriching experiences that will serve them in their professional and personal lives. At our institution, HIPs have been integrated into the UTEP Edge program, designed to improve student retention and success. Some HIPs that can be explored further are:

• Project-Based Learning
• Writing to Learn
• Service/Community-based Learning
• Exploring Global Diversity

Use Blackboard for collaboration outside the classroom

Blackboard, UTEP’s Learning Management System, is a great tool that allows faculty to provide students an opportunity to organize and collaborate outside of the classroom. These interactions can be structured or free and help students to build their sense of social presence and learning community.

• Create group discussions
• Create group assignments
• Create group assignments for students to meet conveniently outside of class to collaborate.
• Enable Class Conversations to allow students to comment on materials and assignments.

Provide feedback

Arguably the most important element of the learning environment is specific, guiding feedback that meets the learner where they are and helps them to move forward. It is best to analyze elements of a required task or skill test to determine what is most important for students to learn and focus feedback on those elements.