Active Learning

We provide ideas below to give you a flavor for the range of activities that are possible online, though this list is hardly exhaustive. Feel free to browse. You can read more about Instructional Strategies as well as in Learning Assessment Techniques (2016) by Barkley and Major, available as an ebook through GW Libraries.

Remember that your activities should be purposeful and aimed at helping students master the course assignments. An activity can be graded or ungraded, so don't worry if some activities double as part of your assessment strategy. Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATS) described at the end of this section provide smaller activities you can use separately or in conjunction with these larger activities to gauge students' mastery of course material as you teach.

Teaching with Video

•  This article outlines some suggestions of ways to make video you decide to include in your course more interactive.

Socratic Method

• Real time: Using a chat room (or even a tool like Twitter), you can facilitate a live discussion with your students using the Socratic method. Plan a time for the whole class to simultaneously be online and in the chat room (or on Twitter). Prior to the start time, send around an article or video for the students to read/watch. During the live discussion, apply the Socratic method by asking targeted questions to students about the reading/video.
• Real time: Using a live online classroom like Blackboard Collaborate is the best way to replicate the in-person experience of being questioned using Socratic method. This synchronous environment lets you challenge students on the spot by voice or with the chat feature. You might use the polling feature to involve the whole class in responding to questions posed. Additionally, synchronous sessions can be recorded for students, and you, to review the discussion and to watch if they have to miss a session. Students prepare for the session by reading or watching background material provided through links in the Blackboard course.
• Asynchronous. Socratic method can be also be simulated in a video of you facilitating a discussion with two to three current or former students (here’s an example of what this could look like). You carefully plan throughout this video a series of stopping points along the way where you direct your attention away from the students in the video and towards the online students so that they ponder the question. You might have the online students record their thoughts in a Blackboard discussion forum or journal and respond to at least one classmate’s response.

Teaching with Case Studies

 

• Asynchronous: Case studies are well suited to online. Link to the case readings and/or videos in Blackboard and decide if you want students to respond to the case in an assignment, discussion board, and/or reflection journal. A slightly more involved approach is to ask the students to role-play as one of the case’s main characters. After reading/watching the case, the students provide a response to the main dilemma by uploading their responses to Blackboard, posting in a discussion forum or creating a blog post.
• Real time: Prepare students as you would for asynchronous interaction, but consider discussing the case in real time using Blackboard Collaborate. The live time gives you the option to use Socratic method or a debate format to encourage students to think more deeply about the case. If you have students role play (described above), a synchronous discussion brings all the student roles and perspectives together.

Writing to Learn

• Asynchronous: Before students begin a reading, use an annotation tool to add guided discussion points at critical junctures in the reading. Students then must read the document and, using the annotation tool, reply to each of your discussion points. In order to create dialogue among students, you may want to give students the option of replying directly to your discussion points or to another student’s reply.
• Mixed Approach: Create a micro writing task (i.e. one that students could complete in 30 minutes or less) that challenges your students to reflect on an important course topic or one of the week’s important course readings or videos. Release the writing task in Blackboard approximately 15 to 30 minutes prior to when it’s due. Students complete the writing task and upload their responses to Blackboard.
• Real time: Add a real time element to the activity above by facilitating a live Collaborate session with your students immediately following the submission of the micro writing task. Use the first 10 minutes of the session to reflect as a whole group on the writing task.
• Asynchronous: Use the journal tool in Blackboard to have students reflect on what they’re learning weekly. If you want to add a social dimension to this activity, you can use the Blackboard blog tool instead of the journal and require that students not only write their own blog piece, but also respond to at least two other students' blog posts.

Contemplative Pedagogy

• Real time: Start off your weekly synchronous session by leading your students in a 10 minute meditative exercise. Afterwards, use Collaborate’s breakout rooms to encourage students to reflect on the exercise in small groups. Consider popping in and out of the breakout rooms to get a sense of any themes that may emerge especially as they relate to managing student stress and/or mitigating student distraction. Based on those themes, you may want to post related resources (e.g. one on managing stress) to Blackboard.
• Asynchronous: Create or collect a short series of meditative exercises and add them to your Blackboard course. During high-stress periods of the semester (e.g. midterm and finals week) have the students participate in one of these exercises and create a short journal entry afterwards reflecting on their experience with the exercise.

Discussion as a way of teaching

• Asynchronous: Craft a discussion question that requires your students to reflect on and synthesize some of the key ideas and concepts presented in the weekly readings and/or videos. Some features of effective question prompts in an online environment include: encouraging multimedia rich responses (i.e. allow students to post videos, audio, and images, in addition to textual responses, where appropriate), invoking personal experiences and getting at student motivations, and incorporating hypothetical scenarios. Students use VoiceThread or Blackboard’s discussion forum to post their responses. In order to really facilitate a discussion, you may want to not only require that students post a response to the question prompt, but also respond to at least two other student posts. See Module 4 on online discussion for more information.
• Asynchronous: Create a video or voiceover delivering a bite-sized course topic or concept to your students. Within that video or voiceover, design at least one stopping point where the video/voiceover pauses and students must reflect on the topic or idea just presented. They must submit their response to the open-ended question in a Blackboard discussion forum. While crafting your stopping point questions for an online environment you may want to consider encouraging multimedia rich responses, invoking personal experiences, and incorporating hypothetical scenarios, where possible.
• Real time: Through a Blackboard Collaborate session, pose a series of questions for the students to consider. Using Collaborate’s breakout room feature, divide the students into small groups to discuss and answer those questions. Afterwards, have the class come back together as a large group and share the main points from their small group discussions. To more effectively facilitate small group discussions in an online environment, you may want to consider assigning roles to each group member. For instance, groups could consist of a note-taker, moderator, time-keeper, presenter, and more.

Media for Learning

• Asynchronous: Create course materials (e.g. videos/voiceovers, readings/articles, blog posts, etc.) that present different viewpoints on a controversial topic. Students must review the material, chose the side of the debate they agree with most, and post a response in the Blackboard discussion forum explaining why they picked the side they did. To add another dimension to this activity, you may also want to use an online polling tool to gather student responses before submitting their discussion forum posts.
• Asynchronous: Design a digital storytelling project wherein your students must answer a series of exploratory and open-ended questions related to some of your course’s main themes. Students are asked to use the material they encounter and create throughout the course to weave together a multimedia rich story (i.e. one that may include graphs, images, videos, texts, links to online articles, etc.) in response to those questions. Students should also be encouraged to add reality to their stories by gathering information, data, pictures, videos, etc. from their own communities to strengthen their digital stories with real-life components. At the end of the course, have students present their stories to the rest of the class through a tool like VoiceThread or Blackboard’s blog, which allows for multimedia rich presentations and discussions.

Reacting to the Past

• Asynchronous: After choosing a scenario to use for this activity, present that scenario to the students through a mix of readings and videos in Blackboard. Divided into small groups, have students role play as different actors in the scenario. Use the Blackboard discussion forum, wiki or VoiceThread to facilitate a conversation among the students about this scenario.
• Real time: For a synchronous version of this activity, proceed in the same fashion as above, but this time, instead of having students debate the scenario in the discussion forums, use a live Collaborate session to bring students together to try and reach a compromise. You may want to consider using a formal debate or mock trial format to facilitate the session. The Socratic method could also be utilized in this situation.

Collaborative Learning

• Real time: Using a tool like Blackboard Collaborate, pose a question or series of questions to the students, who are then broken into small groups (using Collaborate’s breakout rooms feature) to discuss those questions. You may want to consider encouraging the small groups to assign different group roles to students, like moderator, time-keeper, and presenter. Towards the end, bring all the students back together and have one member of each group share their group’s answers. Use Collaborate’s poll and chat feature to keep students engaged throughout the discussion. (Discussions could take place asynchronously using the Groups tool in Blackboard.)

Case Teaching in Science

• Asynchronous: Present the case to students through a mix of readings, videos and other course materials posted to Blackboard. You may want to break up students into groups at this stage. Students (either individually or in their groups) then submit their response to the case study dilemma via a presentation tool like Voicethread or through a collaborative tool like Blackboard’s wiki or blog.
• Real time: To add another dimension to the activity above, consider using Blackboard Collaborate to facilitate a synchronous group discussion after students have submitted their responses to the case study dilemma. You may want to consider using the Socratic method to facilitate the session and challenge students to think further and deeper about the case.

Interactive Lecturing

• Asynchronous: When creating a course video or voiceover, incorporate several stopping point questions that require your students to reflect on the content being presented. You can use a stopping point to link to a short Blackboard exam or discussion exercise that students must complete before moving on with the video. Stopping points can also be used to link students to additional and relevant materials online so that they can dig deeper into a particular topic. Consider adding stopping points every two to three minutes in your videos and voiceovers to ensure your students are actively taking part in the video/voiceover.
• Real time: While lecturing or facilitating a discussion through Blackboard Collaborate, use some of the features of that platform that can make those sessions more interactive. For instance, break up students into small groups for targeted discussion by using Collaborate’s breakout rooms. Or keep the students engaged with your content by regularly soliciting their feedback through the polling or chat feature.

Just In-Time Teaching

• Real Time: Consider using Blackboard Collaborate to facilitate regular live sessions with your class. Approximately two days before that live session, students complete a short quiz (through a Blackboard Exam) testing their understanding of the week’s most important topics and concepts. Before the live session, you analyze the quiz results and identify the gaps in student knowledge, determining the most common area(s) that students don’t seem to be grasping. Prepare for the live session by focusing your lecture/discussion notes around these identified gaps and plan to give ample time to address these areas during the discussion with students.
• Asynchronous: At the beginning of each week, set up a quick Blackboard Exam, testing your students' understanding of the week’s key topics and ideas. Evaluate the results of those quizzes, identifying the areas wherein students were the weakest. With those weak areas in mind, create a voiceover or screencast video (or series of videos) as a remediation for those weak areas. Post the voiceovers/screencasts to Blackboard and set up a discussion forum to allow students to post any lingering questions they may have about the concepts/topics in question.

Peer Instruction

• Real Time: Use Blackboard Collaborate to facilitate a live session with your students. Test the students’ understanding of a key concept by posing a question they must answer or problem they must solve. Give the students a few minutes to come up with an answer on their own. Afterwards, have students reply to the answer using Collaborate’s polling feature. If, based on the polling results, the majority of your students seem to correctly grasp the concept, you can move on to the next topic. Alternatively, if the majority of your students seem to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the topic, have them break up into small groups, using Collaborate’s breakout rooms, to further discuss the question and attempt to reach the proper solution.

Peer-Led Team Teaching

• Asynchronous: With your students broken into small peer-led groups, have them use Blackboard discussion forums or the wiki to discuss, share and collaborate around the week’s main concepts/topics. As a synchronous alternative to this activity, encourage the students to meet through Blackboard Collaborate for live discussions.

Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning

• Asynchronous: Design an activity that engages students in one of the core course concepts or topics. Require that the activity be completed in small groups of three or four students. Use Blackboard’s Groups to assign specific information and resources to each group. Blackboard’s Wiki or even a shared Google doc can be used as the collaborative document for students to complete and submit their group activities.

Project-Based Learning

• Asynchronous: Focus your students around a particular question that requires them to do investigation somewhere in their community to properly answer and that relates to one of the underlying concepts of the course. Assign students to then work either independently or in small groups to create a solution to the issue at hand. You can use Blackboard’s group feature and/or wiki tool to help facilitate the small group work. Once the students have completed their projects they should create a demo or tutorial video using their mobile device illustrating their solution and how it addresses the main question/dilemma. You can make a YouTube channel for the course where students can upload their final projects.

**TECHNOLOGY ALERT! If you are introducing new technology tools as part of the activity, provide instructions and a way for students to test the tool ahead of the activity.