Active Learning

Active learning in a hybrid environment

Active learning is one of the three University of Liverpool Hallmarks, so it is a core part of our curriculum, whatever discipline we teach and in whatever circumstances.

Active learning becomes even more important in hybrid contexts, however. We need to proactively design opportunities that will allow students to form a cohesive learning community when their interactions are more dispersed (online a/synchronous and face-to-face). Students will have fewer instances when they can benefit from the advantages of physical proximity, so they need additional opportunities to connect and interact with others.

Students may also struggle more with motivation as they do more of their work from home, potentially feeling isolated from others. Their engagement can also be challenged when they are navigating an educational landscape that may be new to them.

Hybrid learning has great potential to meet these challenges, however, and offers many opportunities for effective and enjoyable learning and teaching.  Modifying our modules for hybrid active learning (HAL) invites us to use our creativity to provide activities that will stimulate our students to learn deeply, to engage with their studies, with ourselves and with fellow students.  

Why hybrid active learning?

By engaging our students with activities, we can

• raise motivation and foster deeper learning (Brewer & Burgess 2005; Petty 2018; Persellin & Daniels 2014).
• provide opportunities for students to work collaboratively and to apply knowledge, developing understanding and employability skills (Biggs 2003; Zepke & Leach 2010).
• help build relationships between students in group activities that will foster their confidence and sense of belonging at a time when face-to-face interactions are less frequent.
• enable students to assess the extent of their learning.
• provide ourselves with essential feedback on students’ understanding, when we have fewer opportunities to ‘read’ our students’ faces in the classroom. We can then modify our teaching to create more opportunities for our students to tackle the concepts they find most challenging (Exley & Dennick 2009).

Key approaches in all learning & teaching modes

• Consider taking a design approach which is activity-based rather than topic-based (Advance HE 2020).
• Focus more on facilitating learning than on transmitting knowledge to create HAL.
• Keep your learning outcomes in mind. How will each activity enable your students to attain these outcomes?
• Tell students what they’ll be doing and why. Not all students are familiar or initially comfortable with active pedagogies. All students will benefit from you providing a rationale for the activities you set. Provide support for the activity and co-create protocols for participation with your students.
• Clear, well-sequenced step-by-step instructions for activities are key in all contexts, but perhaps particularly online. You might want to ask someone to test-run your activities to help you spot where students may become confused.
• Keep accessibility and inclusiveness in mind. Will your activities be accessible to all students? Can you create activities that reflect the diversity of our students?
• Plan for how students will get feedback on all activities. This could be from you, from peers, automatic computer-based feedback, or even from individuals themselves (e.g. ask them to compare their output with a model answer output you provide). 
• To maximise your students’ learning, challenging them in a range of ways, devise activities that span the full range of the ABC learning types.

Hybrid active learning in different teaching modes

Face-to-face

If you have students who are unable to attend in-person, will you invite them to attend online (if they are able to do so)? Will the online students be visible and audible to in-person students? Or will you ask in-person students to monitor the chat and alert you to an online student’s question or discussion contribution? Will you use your clip-on microphone to repeat in-person students’ contributions to discussion so online students can access them? See the post Links to an external site. from Derek Bruff from Vanderbilt University for more on thinking through active learning in the hybrid face-to-face classroom, as well as taking a look at our Canvas page on socially distanced face-to-face learning and on the socially distanced classroom. 

Online synchronous

The Students as Partners project at Western Sydney University share some great insights in this short video. They want to be doing things, not just listening. They enjoy personalised relationship-based learning, social interaction, group work, polls.  They are smart students but they find they can get lost easily in online classes – they are looking for well-structured, chunked classes (after 20 minutes talk time, they zone out) where the relevance of what they are doing is always clear. Take a look:

Group work is one way to enable active learning and peer collaboration in your online classes.  Why not explore some of CIE’s group work resources? 

Don't forget about micro-activities too. Ask students to post an emoji expressing how they're feeling today; get them to use the 'hands up' facility to perform a Mexican wave; challenge them to turn up to class with a Zoom/Teams background (or costume!) that matches the theme of study for the session, etc. Help students to get to know the platform you're using through fun collective activities like these.  

Online asynchronous

This form of online active learning can be more accessible - as it is asynchronous, it can be flexibly accessed and does not rely on students sharing a time zone or consistent broadband access.

One form of active learning that can work asynchronously is the use of discussion boards. Students need guidance on how to contribute actively and meaningfully, so take a look at Vanessa Dennen's Discussion Board Guidelines Download Discussion Board Guidelines

(Creative Commons, so you can adapt with attribution) and her thinking around designing discussion-based asynchronous activities Links to an external site.. 

It is best to ask students to acquire knowledge/engage with content asynchronously, but this doesn't have to be passive learning.  One thing to avoid would be to load up a past lecture capture and simply give students a list of resources, saying ‘watch this, read this’. You might instead curate some relevant resources and ask students to do something as they acquire content, with an output that can be used as the basis of discussion in a synchronous session or an asynchronous online discussion board activity.

For example: ask students to watch this YouTube Video, compare it with this extract from text book A, evaluate the accuracy of the video content, or identify how the creator has used alternate media to try and enhance understanding of the topic. Think about how resources might be used to complement each other in students’ asynchronous interaction.​

You might even use a simple video to inspire and prepare your students to approach asynchronous content as if they were embarking on a quest. Check out this informal video made by Sam Solnick and his colleagues in English, which they put together for students who were about to watch an adaptation of Frankenstein. You don't need to recruit your colleagues (or dress up in costume!) to create a video that functions similarly, but you may be able to see how you could direct students' attention and prepare them to actively engage with content. 

 

Additional Resources

Durham University have created a useful form to help you think through the design of activities. Durham University Activity Proforma from CC licensed Designing digitally course.docx Download Durham University Activity Proforma from CC licensed Designing digitally course.docx

This short Inside Higher Ed article Links to an external site. from Steven Mintz (2020) suggests many ways to make online learning active. He names a variety of digital tools for different activities; if you’re interested in using any of them and want to check whether they are UoL core, supported or recognised, take a look at our Overview of Digital Tools page.

See our Spotlight Guide to Online Pedagogy, authored by Peter Kahn, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and National Teaching Fellow as well as director of our Centre for Higher Education Studies. Peter emphasises the importance of creating opportunities for our students to construct knowledge. 

 

References

Biggs, J. B. (2003). Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. 2nd ed. Maidenhead, England: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press.

Brewer, E. W., & Burgess, D. N. (2005). Professor’s role in motivating students to attend class Links to an external site.. Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, 42:23, 23– 47.

Brown, D. & Parkin, D. )2020) Design and Delivery – Creating Socially Distanced Campuses and Education Project. Advance HE (Member Benefit).

Bruff, D. (2020) Active Learning in Hybrid and Socially Distanced Classrooms Links to an external site..  Vanderbilt [online]:. Accessed 7 July 2020

Durham University (2020) Designing Digitally. Accessed 7 July 2020.

Exley, K. & Dennick, R. (2009). Giving a lecture: from presentation to teaching. (Key guides for effective teaching in higher education). New York, London: Routledge.

Persellin, D., & Daniels, M. B. (2014). A concise guide to improving student learning: six evidence-based principles and how to apply them (First Edition). Sterling, Va: Stylus.

Petty, G. (2018). Active learning Links to an external site..

Shuell, T.J. (1986). Cognitive conceptions of learning Links to an external site.. Review of Educational Research, 56, 411-436.

Zepke, N., & Leach, L. (2010). Improving student engagement:Ten proposals for action Links to an external site.. Active Learning in Higher Education, 11:3, 167–177.