Bite-sized active learning
How to navigate the collections to find the right active learning activities to improve student engagement.
Active learning vs passive learning
Active learning is learning by doing, as opposed to learning via the passive reception of information.
Information can be passively received in many formats, including readings, podcasts, lectures, and videos, where students are not explicitly required to do anything with that information beyond abstractly “absorbing” it.
Why active learning?
Compared with passive learning, facilitating active learning has been shown to bring about improvements in student engagement, retention of information, academic achievement, critical thinking and problem-solving skills (Prince, 2004), and reduced achievement gaps for underrepresented student groups (Theobald et al, 2020).
The promotion of “active, collaborative and engaged pedagogies” (ANU Learning and Teaching Strategy, 2022) is one of the 12 goals outlined in the ANU Learning and Teaching Strategy.
How to embed active learning
Active learning can be embedded at a range of scales, from breaking up a lecture with a small activity, such as a think-pair-share, to major innovations in course design, such as flipped learning. This resource offers ideas for active learning at the small-activity end of the scale. The activities in this resource require little preparation and take from under 10 minutes, to a maximum of 30 minutes, to run.
Using the bite-sized active learning collections
Each resource collection is grouped based on the learning outcomes of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This will help to easily find an activity that supports the learning outcomes of the class.
The collections include:
- Remembering activities: to help students to remember and recall key information
- Understanding activities: to help students comprehend the meaning of content.
- Applying & Analysing activities: to help students analyse and apply what they have learned in different contexts
- Evaluating & Creating activities: to help students assess and make decisions about content to create something new.
Each page of a collection represents one activity and occupies a unique URL that can be shared.
Choosing the right activity
Activities in the Remembering and Understanding collections will be more appropriate for helping students grasp new concepts.
Activities in the Evaluating & Creating collection will help students to engage with familiar concepts in more complex ways.
Despite the numbering of the pages, you are free to use the activities in any order.
How to use each activity
Each activity comes with general instructions, as well as suggestions for variations. These variations are not comprehensive: each activity could be adapted in many ways to better suit a given context.
For example, while these activities are written for a face-to-face context, many of them could be adapted into asynchronous online activities.
Improve student satisfaction
Students may be accustomed to more passive learning environments and while active learning improves outcomes, students can feel like they are learning less when active learning strategies are used. This is because the fluency of lectures can give the illusion of easily understanding the material.
Making students aware of this, and the benefits of active learning, may help reduce the risk of dissatisfaction. Ensure that students understand the purpose of an activity and how it will help them learn.
Accessibility
Remember to consider accessibility when introducing new activities. The accessibility considerations for a class that only involves sitting and listening to a lecture will be different from those for a class that requires, for example, moving around a room, discussing topics in groups, or deciphering an image.
As well as disability, consider other accessibility factors such as English fluency and access to relevant devices such as smart phones.