Active Learning

Adult online learners are often non-traditional learners. They juggle multiple life demands, often multi-tasking. Many are returning to school after time away. They have varying levels of digital literacy, and a vast array of life experiences. While online learners may appear to be too diverse to have common goals and learning obstacles, this assumption is…

Roleplays are an active learning technique in which students take on the roles of particular stakeholders in a situation they are learning about in order to explore a problem and consider solutions (Beckmann & Mahanty, 2016). Roleplays are commonly used in higher education to introduce students to course content in such a way that emphasizes…

Shifting the passive classroom environment of a faculty lecturing and students note-taking to an interactive engaging learning environment has exposed many students to using polling such as clicker technology or online polling software.  In addition, many faculty have engaged Dr. Eric Mazur’s technique of polling (Lambert, 2012) which poses questions for students to answer independently…

Quizzes are a well-established method for testing student understanding, in both forms of summative and formative assessments. To ensure that the quizzes are impactful for students, intentionality is required (Ebner & Efron, 2012). Instructors must consider that the timing, modality, and approach all influence its effectiveness. When using quizzes in alignment with learning objectives, results…

In today’s complex world, acquiring knowledge and using tools in a single domain is insufficient to remain competitive as individuals.

Active learning features a generative component whereby students process the educational material of interest and articulate its relevance within the context of both coursework and their own lives.

Description Today’s technological environment requires practical skills in online competencies; one of these skills is webinar facilitation. Facilitation is a useful skill to support group in meeting an objective, making a decision, or collaborating more effectively. Facilitation is also the teaching strategy that can be selected for assignments in order to: (1) model for students…

In order to build the scaffolding for learning, students need to acquire knowledge to build from. Lectures and chapter reading assignments can make current Instructional Designers cringe, but often times it is a time-efficient strategy to deliver content. What the authors of Make it Stick illustrate so well is that often when learners listen or…

In an online course, a frequent criticism is that the PowerPoint presentations are poorly designed and critical supporting information is often missing (with no presenter to fill in the blanks!). On the other hand, instructional simulations combine multimedia elements (i.e. sound, images, video, etc) to represent (simulate) particular aspects of an actual situation (Hays, 2006).…