An Active Learning ‘co-created ideas’ collection
Dr Roisin Donnelly and Dr Youcef Sai
What is the idea?
The aim of this work is to apply the active learning (AL) principles of knowledge co-creation and collaboration among academics; a PG Certificate cohort is the example given to illustrate how the communication and collation of ideas among a group of academics happens in practice. The chapter focuses on how a cohort of early-mid career academics can mentor each other and co-create resources. Through their interaction in this active learning activity, inexperienced educators who are interested in improving student engagement, through a process of dialogue and reflection, and in a short time-frame can co-create a suite of strategies that they can take to their own practice, contextualise and implement.
The chapter presents a dialogic and reflective activity targeted at a community of educators participating as learners in an online PG Certificate in ‘University Teaching’. Participants who are from a wide range of subject disciplines are encouraged to discuss and reflect on their own active learning ideas and strategies that they regularly use with their students in their own disciplinary f2f and online classes. By the end of the one-hour PG Cert class, the co-created ideas are formed into a ‘Collection’ (partially shown in the figure below) and subsequently disseminated on the course VLE with all cohorts as a form of inspiration for each other and shared learning across the disciplines. Through engagement with literature, this activity shows how research can inform the development of educators’ AL engagement to enable them to reflect on and then apply AL practices to the classroom.
Discussion headings in the ‘Active Learning Co-created Ideas Collection’
- What are the reasons for designing your classes to be interactive?
- What does an interactive class look like in your discipline?
- What are the possible barriers to active learning in your discipline?
Some examples given by this year’s cohort (2021):
- Lack of flexibility on the part of teachers to be more student-centred in their teaching.
- Department restrictions.
- Culture – old versus new outlooks/perspectives.
- Access/use of technology (online).
- Lack of practical implementation opportunities.
- Psychological/Fear of failure/inability to succeed.
- What you do to encourage engagement at the START | MIDDLE | END of a class?
- What impact have you observed/measured when using this active learning strategy in your own practice?
Why this idea?
Two key pedagogic principles of AL have been highlighted in this work – collaborative dialogue and reflection; these have led to a synergetic process of combining content and process from disciplinary traditions to synthesise new ways of knowing, and in this instance, lead to a collaboratively created output.
This active learning co-created activity has clear benefits by allowing early career academics (who are mainly the participants on this PG Certif