Active Learning at COPH

Welcome

What is Active Learning?

"Active learning involves providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject". (Meyers & Jones, 1993, p.6). Active learning is anything but students passively listening to a lecture. Active learning can be applied to most commonly used course activities. Even lecturing, which may seem to be inherently passive, can be an active learning experience if the instructor creates opportunities for the student to engage with the lecture.

There is a multitude of research and an anecdotal evidence that support the claim that students learn better when they are engage with the course content and actively interacting with their classmates and the instructor. Active learning involves a shift in roles for both student and instructor. This type of teaching is known as the student-center method where the instructor becomes more of a facilitator and students take more responsibility of their learning by being involved in their own learning process.

Implementing Active Learning activities into your lesson involves planning and that's why we created this resource site, to assist you in the design and development of those activities. This repository is full of pedagogical strategies and methods taken from the literature and are known to increase student learning. You will also find a multitude of Active Learning activities that can be implemented in your classroom at any time. These activities are being utilized by different instructors in many subjects.

Modules Information

There are 10 modules in this course. In module 1 you will find benefits, considerations, challenges and best practices when implementing active learning. In module 2 you will find information about the blended approaches, as well as the Flipped and Hyflex model, which can enhance and support the integration of the Active Learning Classroom movement. In module 3 you will find different Instructional Models that can help you design your activities. These models will describe the many aspects that should be consider when planning an activity. In module 4 you will find active learning activities that can be implemented at the beginning, during/after lecture and at the end of the class. Please note that these activities can be utilized at any time and they can be for individual or group work. In module 5 you will find active learning activities for group work. In module 6 there is a list of activities being used by instructors in Public Health. module 7 contains activities aligned with the different levels of cognitive thinking. module 8 you will find some of the documents we have shared with faculty during our orientation training. module 9 you will find additional resources and finally module 10 contains resources and tutorials for the Microsoft Hub.