Today we are pleased to launch our “Online Active Learning” resource! Stuck for ideas of how to engage your students with online learning? Look no further. We have already collated a number of contributions from network members and are keen to add to this as an on-going project. In line with our philosophy, this is a free-to-access resource that we hope will be of use to anyone interested in developing methods or tools for active learning remotely. You can explore the resource either via the link below or from our resource page on our website:
Whether it’s using Snapchat for online tutorials, Poll Everywhere for assessing class opinions, Padlet for collaborative working or using screencast tools to help students make sense of assessment feedback, there is a wealth of ideas included already and we already have more in the pipeline so will be adding to this as time progresses.
There is also a link to the recordings of our webinar series which includes, amongst others, ideas for using Cryptic Crosswords (Liza Weber), Peer assessment (Nimi Hoffman), Game based learning (Bindu Thirumalai) or Distance Learning (Forent Zwiers).
If you would like to contribute an idea / tool / method that has worked well for you, please do email us at activelearningnetwork@gmail.com or simply add it to the padlet wall (it is moderated!). It doesn’t have to be something earth-shattering- sometimes even the simplest ideas can be incredibly effective. Bite-sized contributions are particularly welcome (~3 min video, podcast or ~300 word summary).
The emphasis is on helping each other to develop excellent active learning techniques to enable our students to get the maximum out of their online learning experiences and for us to work together to push the boundaries of excellence in pedagogy. If you have questions about the contributions, please use the comment box on the padlet wall to raise these or if you have tried something similar, we would love to hear about this too.
As well as the development of this resource, we have some exciting developments coming up:
Webinar Series: We are now planning our next run of webinars and are looking for contributors. Do let us know if you would be interested in leading on one of these.
Book publication: We are also looking forward to the second publication in the Active Learning Network series. The second book is from the Anglia Ruskin University satellite group of the network. Watch this space for more info soon! (and if you missed the first, led by the University of Sussex satellite group, take a look here: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/vm40xt05h?locale=en).
The Active Learning Network 