I first started looking into active learning when I realised that students were not going to be able to meet the new curriculum competencies using passive learning strategies, especially in my math class. I wanted to get my students engaged in learning to build skills instead of their current habit of passively trying to absorb knowledge. Their focus of “when am I going to use this?” was focused on the specific content knowledge and made a lot of sense. My response to “when am I going to use this?” usually related to the competencies that they practice and skills they develop while using the content. While they don’t think anything of me saying “you’re going to be using problem-solving in your life and you may need a few different strategies – optimization, categorization, etc.” Instead, they think I am not actually answering their question. That is when I realized that the focus is blurry – I want them to focus on the skills they are building but the lessons and activities I’m presenting to them are not doing that. The other reason I have been looking into active learning strategies is that it can be hard to capture students’ engagement in online courses. If students are required to be more active in the learning process, maybe they will be more engaged.
While Queens University’s and University of Minnesota’s explanations and implementation strategies for active learning are at the university level, they give a lot of useful information. For example, Queens University offers a module based approach to work through learning how to incorporate active learning and University of Minnesota offers a Classroom Activities/Assessment Matrix.
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