Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Getting faculty on board with active learning is key to improving student outcomes; as such, incorporating these learning strategies requires buy-in from both instructors and students. Although active learning is any instructional method that engages students, it actually goes beyond engagement and requires students to perform meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing.1 But for faculty, the time and preparation needed to create and deliver these activities can be obstacles.

In this ongoing series focused on flipped and active-learning classrooms, we’re taking a deeper look into how to create successful learning experiences for students. We’ve examined how to encourage students to complete pre-class work, how to hold students accountable for pre-class work, and how to connect pre-class work to in-class activities. Now let’s focus on the challenge of managing the in-person learning environment.

We often hear of the importance of collaborative learning but through personal observation and through instructor-student dialogue over the years, it seems the concept is often lost on instructors at the university level. While effective collaborative learning can take some effort on the part of instructors and students, there are simple steps that can be applied that will likely generate positive results in relatively little time.

Collaborative learning and growing is synonymous with commons, collective, interactive, and shared spaces. Shared spaces in a physical capacity are foundational elements in establishing collaborative learning. Collaborative learning can also be seen as a data or information commons whereby multiple students are learning together, and sharing their knowledge, points of view, what they know and how, how they reached those perspectives, and what pathways can be pursued as a result of what another student thinks and why.

After completing the assigned reading, students take a short online quiz that must be completed before class. Their answers help guide that day's lesson.