Topic A5.5: Designing Learning Activities that Promote Active Learning Introduction

Check the Research
Click on the link below for Microsoft Word document 'Models of Interactive Learning' and investigate the research-based models that emphasize student interaction with other students and interaction with content.  What model or models might work well for a segment of content that you wish to deliver in your Web-based course?

Click here to access the MS Word document.

Building a Learning Community
Through these three kinds of interaction, students actively engage in learning that enables them to construct their own meaning and knowledge. Learning becomes a collaborative process in which students assume more responsibility rather than being passive learners. A faculty member reflecting on her first experience with active Web-based learning comments:

"Before this experience, I viewed teaching as a controlled and controlling process. In relinquishing the power to learn to the students themselves, I am also relinquishing the responsibility to succeed in learning. It is a freeing feeling to realize that I have don't to be Atlas to the students, as I have now acquired partners in the learning process."

(Hirumi, A. & Bermudez, A. (1996) Interactivity, Distance Education, and Instructional Systems Design Converge on the Information Superhighway.  Journal of Research and Computing in Education 24 (1), p. 14.

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