Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Learning remotely and online can present new challenges, or just put a strain on your existing learning strategies. You might be finding that you’re being provided with a lot of learning materials such as powerpoint slides, video, readings or handouts. What do you do with all this material, and how can you make sure you’re learning effectively rather than just staring at your screen, with nothing really going in?

Listen to Helen, one of our tutors, suggesting a few strategies to ensure that you’re actively engaging with learning materials and getting the most out of them.

Those who teach in the health disciplines expect their students to retain and apply every iota of learned material. However, many students come to us having achieved academic success by memorizing the content, regurgitating that information onto an exam, and promptly forgetting a good portion of it. In health, as well as other disciplines where new material builds upon the material from the previous semesters, it is critical for students to retain what they learn throughout their coursework and as they begin their careers as a nurse, engineer, elementary teacher, etc.

A 2015 survey of Faculty Focus readers found that the number one barrier preventing faculty from implementing the flipped classroom model and other active learning experiences into their courses is TIME. Faculty reported they don’t have time to plan extra learner-centered activities, due to increasing responsibilities, and they don’t have time to implement the activities in class because there’s too much content to cover.

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.

I have mostly seen active learning used in opposition to passively listening to lectures or passively rereading a text, and more broadly, in opposition to any kind of sitting still. In Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom (1991), Charles Bonwell and James Eison state that “students must do more than just listen,” and they define active learning as “instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing.”1

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. 

Freely available, open education resources provide opportunities for college students to strengthen their critical thinking and quantitative literacy skills using sophisticated active-learning strategies.

In a 2017 Wakefield market research survey, investigators found 85 percent of college students elected not to buy one or more required hard copy course textbooks. Students also are turning more frequently to their mobile devices to complete their coursework. 

Their reasons included the high price of textbooks and the fact that they did not value textbooks as learning tools. Instead, students are enticed by online course content, which can be accessed anywhere on campuses equipped with modern network infrastructures.

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.