Student-created infographics: three practical ideas for active learning (97/69) -- 100 Ideas for Active Learning

Student-created infographics: three practical ideas for active learning Dr Olga Kozar Infographics: flipped classroom and assessment ‘game-changers’ We are witnessing a true democratisation of graphic tools, such as infographic or banner templates. With a growth of free or freemium (partially free) online services, such as Canva, Easel.ly or Piktochart and an increasing number of free quality templates (e.g. Slidego), creating a professional-looking infographic is easier than ever, and can be done even by beginners. This democratisation of infographic creation presents teachers with a unique opportunity to incorporate infographic-type activities to increase engagement (VanderMolen & Spivey, 2017) and enhance assessments (Dyjur & Li, 2015) in their teaching. Not only can using infographics foster a skill of visual communication, which is highly valued in various industries, but it can also create sustainable learning and teaching objects that can be reused in future offerings of the same subject. What is more, infographics can also contribute to the culture of diversity and inclusion (Ortiz & Redmon, 2020). Below are some ideas for incorporating infographics in your teaching. Idea 1: Increase engagement with otherwise ‘dry’ content, like reading Recent research seems to indicate that up to 80% of university students currently do not read their assigned readings (Deale & Lee, 2021). This has an impact not only on the quality of class discussions, but, most importantly, on student learning and final outcomes. It also tends to undermine teachers’ efforts to flip their classrooms and make their synchronous sessions more interactive and discussion-based. Asking students to create simple infographics with the key information from their assigned readings (or other content, like watching a lecture recording) can become a real game-changer, as infographics hold the potential of promoting deeper learning among students prior to their synchronous sessions and they are also ‘quick-to-process’ for the educator and other students. Deep learning When students formulate key messages of the reading in their own words, and arrange this information visually, they engage in higher order processes, and are therefore more likely to both process content on a deeper level and retain it long-term. Flipped-classroom friendly More and more teachers aspire to ‘flip’ their classrooms and therefore need students to engage with content prior to synchronous sessions. It is widely recommended that teachers use a ‘pre-class assurance of learning’ task to minimise the biggest hindrance to a successful flipped classroom – students not having consumed the content. In my opinion, infographics can be a valuable tool in teachers’ ‘pre-class assurance of learning’ toolbox Benefits of infographics as a ‘pre-class’ task A big advantage of infographics and the reason why they are increasingly used in all kinds of industries is that they are quick to process. It takes less time to see an ima