What is Active Learning? (2023)

“Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing.” –

Samuel Butler, author

According to a study into learning-centered approaches to education, students learn more when they participate in the process of learning. Active learning is discussion, practice, review, or application. Problem solving. Exploring new concepts in groups. Working out a math problem on a piece of paper.

Active learning encourages your brain to activate cognitive and sensory networks, which helps process and store new information. Claire Hoogendoorn, New York City College of Technology wrote a good introductory article on the neuroscience of active learning. She summarized several studies, writing, “...learning is enhanced when multiple neural pathways are activated at the same time. In plain terms, the more we can activate students’ brains in different ways, the more they learn. This means that engaging as many sensory, cognitive, emotional, and social processes in students will increase their learning potential.”

What’s more, Cornell University found that research suggests learner attention starts to wane every 10–20 minutes during lectures — which means instructors are continuously fighting to keep attention. Incorporating regular, varied active learning moments is a great solution to recapture an audience.

The line between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ learning can be blurry. Isn’t a student taking notes during a lecture actively engaged in a class, especially when compared to their peers sleeping or texting in the back of the room? Perhaps, at some point in time, active note-taking was the best we could hope for from our students.

A 1991 study on active learning called “Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom”, the researchers (citing even earlier research) talked about the need to upgrade how we think about engaging our learners:

The problem we see today is that students furiously typing or scribbling notes are more focused on getting every word down, rather than evaluating, understanding, and analyzing what it is they are meant to be learning. They have engaged with the professor, but not the material being relayed — which is the most important part.

In a world with a job market increasingly focused on independent critical thinking abilities, we must teach our learners how to go deeper and engage those higher-order thinking tasks. Reconsidering the degree and form by which students are actively participating matters if we want to truly impact long-term outcomes and futures.

Of course, there are times when passive learning is useful, e.g. scaffolding learners towards expertise more efficiently. But teaching without providing an opportunity to ask questions or discuss is, as attributed to Elliot above, like pumping information into a sieve; ultimately, learners will retain grains of new information, but most will be lost.

More and more instructors are incorporating some active learning approaches into their teaching.

As Arizona State University has pointed out, it is a popular misconception that active learning can only occur in small, face-to-face learning environments. Active learning can also take place in large-enrollment courses, hybrid courses, and online courses through the intentional use of cost-effective technology.

“Intentional” is important to acknowledge because using technology does not innately provide a positive active learning experience. In fact, digital learning technology has generally performed poorly in the past because most implementations result in passive practices, e.g. lifting lectures or artifacts of lectures (like Powerpoint presentations) and putting them online.

For example, if you’re trying to teach students the relationship between brightness and distance, you could create an online lesson that gives the formula, provides a few examples, and asks students to memorize everything. But we know that’s no better than reading a traditional textbook.

Technology-enabled active learning is about the larger design of the lesson. In one example, Professor Ariel Anbar constructed an active approach to teaching the relationship between brightness and distance.

He designed an online lesson that asks students what they think the about relationship between brightness and distance, and then has them test and evaluate their hypotheses. To do so, students explore a simulation of our universe, evaluate the brightness of different stars alongside their “current distance” from that star, and discover the relationship between brightness and distance on their own.

In taking on this exploration, students have engaged several neural pathways and truly dug into the material in order to learn. Professor Anbar coined this approach “Education Through Exploration” and this lesson is now part of a fully online, adaptive, and interactive course called HabWorlds.

Here are a few other ways to bring active learning to your class through technology:

Today’s digital learning technology allows instructors and learning designers to create highly-interactive lessons that can be used as in-class activities, as take-home assignments for flipped/blended courses, or as one module of a fully-online class.

With the right technology, active learning experiences can be scaled to hundreds or thousands of learners. They can also meet accessibility standards while still providing a good experience for learners with disabilities, surpassing the traditional classroom in the ability to support all learners.

It’s always important to note that some activities lend themselves well to interaction from any device — and some don’t. If you want to create active learning experiences that are equally wonderful experiences on desktop, tablet, and mobile, you must plan ahead and take into consideration the size, layout, and complexity of your activity.

What do we think it means that ‘active learning’ has replaced ‘interactive learning’ as the frontrunner in our minds and Google searches? Perhaps interactive learning originally came alongside the question, “How do I get students to interact with my lesson?” which has been left behind as instructors learned that ‘just doing something’ is not good enough… whereas active learning is a recognized pedagogical practice with research-based underpinnings that showcase explain why it positively impacts student learning.

Active learning in the global market

In the 2017 Digital Learning Innovation Report, which surveyed university educators across Australia, the majority of instructors reported that they currently employ some type of active learning technology. That included discussion boards (75%) and tools specializing in interactive learning (65%). The interactive learning options outstripped more passive learning options, such as lecture capture (63%) and presentations (49%).

In the United States, the Department of Education created the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), a plan articulates a vision of equity, active use, and collaborative leadership to make everywhere, all-the-time learning possible. They also shared a Higher Education supplement to examine learning, teaching, leadership, assessment, and infrastructure in the context of higher education. About active learning, they shared:

Technology can provide instructors with the means of creating active learning environments that connect students with content in different ways… For example, rather than traditional lectures, instructors using these tools can create active learning environments that encourage students to collaborate, participate in inquiry based learning, and jointly produce content that demonstrates their learning. In addition, learning can be organized around real-world challenges and scenarios so students can master skills and work together to find collaborative solutions.

In recommendations for improving teaching practices through technology, the NETP report went on to say, "Instructors should use technology to reimagine courses in ways that more actively engage students, are more inclusive of different learning needs, and enable a collaborative and flexible learning environment."

When incorporating technology-based instruction, educators should still be able to flaunt the engaging stories, quirky anecdotes, and fun activities that they have tested and relied upon in the classroom. Digital learning tools can make life simpler for professors, help them reflect on their pedagogy, and make their teaching more powerful without sacrificing their unique, honed teaching voice.

Smart Sparrow encourages educators to create learning activities — old standbys and new ideas — for digital lessons. Our library of learning components offers 30+ different ways to get students to engage with the material. In addition, instructors and learning designers can import existing simulations or reach out to our team for support in creating a completely new activity.

The most powerful part of using Smart Sparrow to provide active learning experiences is the ability to personalize the lesson based on an individual’s actions. Many digital simulations and activities limit instructor insight to “complete/incomplete”, but Smart Sparrow can collect data on every click and length of interaction and then adapt what the student sees next accordingly — this can’t be done with most learning tools or simulations.

What does “adaptive learning” mean for Smart Sparrow? Our adaptive platform relies on expert-model adaptivity, where an instructor or learning designer creates rules such as “If THIS happens, then do THAT” (IFTTT) to guide students’ digital learning experiences.

This is important because it means individual educators maintain complete control over what their students see, when they see it, and why they see it. Adaptivity rules can be easily updated at any time by an instructor, allowing even non-technical instructors to take full advantage of personalization at scale. Examples of rules-based adaptivity depending on activities include:

A data-informed approach to digital learning means instructors can assess the efficacy of their teaching methods to help students achieve better outcomes. Looking at Smart Sparrow’s analysis and reporting tools, instructors know exactly how students are engaging with activities, where they’re getting stuck, and how they’re performing in the class overall.

Moreover, instructors and learning designers can also update content at any time to reference current events, so learning experiences never feel outdated.