What is active learning?

In their book Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, 1987, Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson
“Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must make what they learn part of themselves.”

Educational tools we refer to below:

Mentimeter - Mentimeter is an easy-to-use tool for online voting and interactive, engaging sessions. KI has a campus licence for this tool but if you do not have a KI-account Mentimeteroffers free accounts

Padlet - Padlet is a digital notice board where you can collaborate and interact with students. KI has its own campus license but if you do not have a KI account you can sign up for a free account.

Canvas (KI's Learning Management platform - log in via canvas.ki.se). If you want to see how to use Canvas in your teaching please sign up for one of the free toolkits from KI's Canvas Catalog.

Before we begin

Are students really most alert in the first 10 minutes of your lecture and in the last 10 minutes? What do you think?

Watch this very short video (1.43 minutes) from Aaron Johnson, author of the book "Online Teaching with Zoom", in the Lecture Breaker podcast series episode 53 where he introduces his podcast in this Youtube video. Dr John mentions a study on attention span that from a physiological perspective: in the first 10 minutes people are highly attentive and in the last 10 minutes also attentive and that without active learning strategies for the in-between time of your lecture you will lose students' attention.

Teaching Online with Zoom: How to Increase Student Engagement (video on Youtube)

Read a short blog post from Barbi Honeycutt (Lecture Breakers) Why Do Students Need To Pause and Reflect During Class?

8 Essential Active Learning Strategies

8 Active Learning Strategies to Improve Comprehension | Top Hat (blog). In this blog post from Top Hat with an accompanying video which is hosted on Youtube, teachers are given a few ideas of for creating active learning using 8 strategies. Below the video, we have summarised the 8 strategies but added ideas for KI teachers and which tools can be used for strategies that are common in the classroom but can be reworked using educational technology for online or hybrid sessions.

See the video on Youtube

Strategies and tips

Here we summarise the 8 strategies from TopHat blog but focus on how to do this in a hybrid or online class with suggestions for tools to implement them at KI:

Think-pair-share

With think-pair-share students are first given time to reflect on a question individually, either thinking or writing their answer and once individual reflection time has been given students are asked to pair up, share, and discuss their responses, and finally to regroup as a class and share thoughts with the whole class.

How can you do this online?

But how do you do this online or in a hybrid setting? The University of Indiana has a few tips on Using Think-Pair-Share in Online or Hybrid Environments. They advise teachers to use Canvas and Zoom breakout rooms to post questions and discuss the answers. For example, you could use Canvas group discussions, with students signing up for a group to discuss a subject based on the prompts you have posted. Then students can prepare their answers which they then share in Zoom breakout rooms. You can also use a Padlet for students to document their shared discussions in groups in the final class group share. KI has a campus licence for Padlet. KI also has a guide for Padlet via Canvas.

One-minute papers

One-minute papers are a common way of activating students at the end of lecture or class using a question eg

What was the most important thing you learned today?
What question still remains in your mind?

How can you do this online?

You can use the audience response tool Mentimeter to create an open question allowing students anonymously to give you their response to the question you have posed in the one-minute paper. KI staff can use their KI-ID to log into Mentimeter. Otherwise teachers can create a free account at above.

You could also post a question in your Zoom session BUT get your students to write their answers in the chat BUT to wait until you tell them they can post. Then after a couple of minutes you ask all students to post their answers via the chat. This allows students to think of their own response without the distraction of reading other students' posts.

Quick quizzes

There are a number of ways you can give students the opportunity to reflect and recall key points in your class or lecture, either during a lecture or even before the lecture to test pre-knowledge. These would count as formative assessment.

How can you do this online?

Muddiest point

Muddiest point is a type of active learning strategy that pinpoints the area(s) that students are least confident about in the course material that was just covered. Students note the most confusing part of a lecture or course content and instructors can use these insights to determine how and where to focus future teaching efforts. (source Tophat)

The blended learning toolkit from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a more detailed guide to using this method for those who wish to delve deeper into using the muddiest point as a for of assessment.

How can you do this online?

Why not try using Mentimeter for anonymous input using a free text question? These can be submitted live in a synchronous Zoom session but you can also consider getting students to submit their response asynchronously for you to follow up at a later date. Try embedding the Mentimeter survey (use the setting Audience pace NOT Presenter pace) in your Canvas page. This guide from Mentimeter shows you how to embed Mentimeter results in a web page.
Create an anonymous Padlet (secret link) and share the link live in Zoom or asynchronously via Canvas for follow-up at a later date.
Create a Canvas survey with free text questions for students to submit prior to or after you session. If you use the setting Graded survey the questions will be easier to monitor for you as the teacher via the Gradebook.
Zoom Chat: Post question in your Zoom session BUT get your students to write their answers in the chat BUT to wait until you tell them they can post. Then after a couple of minutes you ask all students to post their answers via the chat. This allows students to think of their own response without the distraction of reading other students' posts.

Debates - discussion forums in online learning

Canvas

Most teachers at KI will be familiar with using Canvas discussion forums for debates online. Discussion forums in Canvas can be "Graded" to ensure participation of the students in each debate as well as creating group discussions. This guide from Canvas Instructure will help you with the basics.

In this toolkit in module 5 you can also delve deeper on the page 5.7 How to create and facilitate discussion forums in general and in Canvas

Don't forget that the Canvas discussion forum allows teachers and students to post video comments in response to you prompts.

Further reading

Use Padlet for your online discussions

Padlet can also be used in a variety of ways for another form of debate. Create a Padlet and post a question for students to answer. Choose from a number of Padlet layouts depending on how you want to scaffold the discussion in your class. Eg you could use Padlet shelf for pros and cons for a discussion. This guide from the University of Melbournegives you some good tips for which layout to choose depending on the learning activity you are planning. They suggest using "wall" or "grid" layout for discussion forums. They give this Padlet example as an illustration of what this can look like in real life: example activity of students posting a personal visual response to what digital learning looks like. Remember that when you create a Padlet you can select whether students can comment on each others posts, like or grade posts. At KI only KI teachers have Padlet log ins using their KI account. This means that as a teacher you will need to ensure that your Padlet is "secret" and give anyone with link the right to write and read comments. The KI guide to Padlet is here.

Post-It Poll and Debate: Using Padlet to Show Changes in Opinion and Spur Discussion from Apped in

Case studies or problem solving

In this active learning strategy, students work in small groups or individually and apply knowledge gained from lectures or reading materials to a given scenario. Provide students with a real-world contemporary case related to your curriculum and learning outcomes. (source: TopHat)

Using Canvas for cases in active learning

At KI many times teachers use patient cases for this kind of activity providing students with authentic problem solving activities. Often these are in the form of assignments (individual or group assignments). Bear in mind that you can also use quiz in Canvas for preparation before discussiing a case and that Canvas allows you to use various forms of media eg videos, sound files etc for your cases. This video (10 minutes) on Youtube gives you an overview of using a number of Canvas components when preparing for and carrying out case discussions in teaching Case-Based Learning with Canvas: Scott Snyder's EMT Class at SRJC

On page 7.2 Redesigning an In-Person Lab to an Online Format (Nursing) which summarizes the Lecture Breaker podcast interview with Jennifer Wallace is a nursing educator at Lawrence Memorial Regis College in Medford, Massachusetts you can hear more about moving online for case based learning.

Peer instruction

Peer instruction can take a number of forms and can be described as peer review or peer assessment. "It is an active learning strategy where students prepare and present course material to the class or in small groups. This approach encourages interaction and trust-building between students—especially important at a time where a portion of learning may take place online." (source: TopHat). With peer assessment students individually assess each other's contribution using a predetermined list of criteria and the use of learning rubrics can be very beneficial to this, see page 4.5 on giving students feedback with learning rubrics.

This method is generally facilitated by using the tools available in the learning management platform. Canvas provides a so- called peer review tool for assignments, both for individual feedback and group feedback. If you are going to use this method we highly recommend that you make sure that your students understand where they will find the feedback from fellow students!

KI has its own guide for peer review in Canvas.

Some perceived advantages:

Agreed marking criteria means there can be little confusion about assignment outcomes and expectations.
Encourages student involvement and responsibility.
Encourages students to reflect on their role and contribution to the process of the group work.
Focuses on the development of student’s judgment skills.
Students are involved in the process and are encouraged to take part ownership of this
process.
Provides more relevant feedback to students as it is generated by their peers.
It is considered fair by some students, because each student is judged on their own
contribution.

Ideas and Strategies for Peer Assessments

The following guide from The University of British Columbia provides teachers with ideas and strategies for working with Peer assessments. The guide illustrates how peer assessment can be used both for formative and summative assessments. The guide takes us through how peer assessment can improve student learning as well as helping us to understand the different types of peer assessment.

Ideas and Strategies for Peer Assessments