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How to Support Active Learning in Your Program

How to Support Active Learning in Your Program

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Osmosis Team

A pedagogical technique highlighted by Charles Bonwell and James Eison in their book, “Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom,” active learning is centered around the active involvement of students in the learning process instead of listening passively to achieve better learning outcomes. Let’s look at some effective active learning strategies in today’s Osmosis blog.All healthcare students start in a classroom, learning organ systems, complex concepts, and best practices for patient care. A student may ace every test, but it can be a whole new experience when they step into their clerkships. Educators today are working to close the gap between what students learn by reading or listening and what is learned by doing. 

What is active learning?

Active learning is when the student engages with the material through an activity or exercise while the instructor functions as a learning facilitator and guide. The process promotes higher-order thinking while students learn to apply knowledge in a safe space.  

Why is active learning important? 

Active learning is crucial because it helps students assess what they know and don’t know early in the learning process. They’re prompted to reflect on the subject and think critically about various connections. Through this process, students are often better able to form frameworks for concepts because the activity helps them add new information to what they already know. 

How to implement active learning 

There are a variety of ways to implement active learning in a course. Many are simple to accomplish using a little creativity! Here are a few examples: 

Short in-class activities: These can be implemented directly into any form of instructional time, including breaking up a large lecture hall. 

  • Multiple-choice questions can be provided to test knowledge throughout the lecture. They can become more interactive with electronic polling methods like Kahoot, where students can instantly see full results, or with board-style assessment items, like Osmosis, where each question includes clinical context and explanations of answers. Additionally, students can pair and share with others around them to discuss how they arrived at correct or distractor answers before focusing back on the instructor. 
  • Open-ended questions often start with words like “how” or “why” and can help students link concepts to foundational knowledge from previous classes. These questions can also challenge students to think about what would happen if part of a process was missing or went wrong. Students write their answers or share them with students next to them and then come back to the group to discuss possible answers. You can even build a question from a video, such as playing the beginning of the Pathology Review video on headaches, pausing after the patient presentations, and asking about what’s happening in the underlying pathologies that can cause a headache and what they think the cause is for each of the case studies presented.
  • Concept maps help show how concepts relate to one another, helping learners make connections. Students can design a concept map during class in groups or independently. For example, in a large lecture hall, you can provide three different topics, have students break into groups of three, and each student in the group selects one of the three topics. Their groups have five minutes to create the concept map independently and then ten minutes to share what they made with their other teammates while helping each other refine their concept maps. 

Full class-time active-learning methods: These active learning strategies take more time, planning, and conducive spaces to set up. 

  • Team-based learning (TBL) engages student learning through individual testing and group collaboration. This process motivates students by holding them accountable to themselves and others while introducing them to a variety of thought processes devoted to a single problem. The initial individual test helps them assess their understanding, and they then have time to collaborate in a group to fill in the gaps for each other. 
  • Problem-based learning (PBL) involves group work designed to identify a problem or scenario, key concepts, and learning objectives, followed by individual research shared with the group in subsequent sessions. In healthcare, students try to make a differential diagnosis and learn about the related pathology and physiology concepts. They can get the most out of these scenarios when leading the conversations and learning but benefit from peer and instructor feedback at the end to improve learning and communication skills.  
  • Case-based learning (CBL) is similar to PBL but often furthers student learning of clinical reasoning with more structured learning objectives, prior knowledge, complicated cases, and clinical scenarios. Typically, students have an opportunity to consider how they would move beyond a differential diagnosis to treatment plans. 
  • Flipped classrooms reverse traditional academic approaches by assigning pre-work before classroom sessions and students sharing what they learned with each other. A flipped classroom engages students in active learning from the beginning and minimizes passive learning.  

Important considerations: There are many ways to incorporate active learning, but deciding which type to do and when can depend on various factors. 

  1. The topic: Some topics are better than others for certain teaching and learning strategies. Active learning is particularly beneficial for linking ideas by building upon information from previous courses or forming a schema.  
  2. Student knowledge: Active learning is most effective when students are aware of the subject and/or can go back and learn from references in the moment. Often a short video or reading assignment before the class can help with familiarity. 
  3. Instructional time: Although students should be familiar with the content, sometimes it is a good chance for them to recognize their knowledge gaps early. Active learning minimizes in-class instructional time, so more may be expected of students outside the classroom. However, class time can be more tailored to specific needs and knowledge gaps. 
  4. Assessment: Because time is limited, assessing students before or after the session can be helpful. Sometimes the same questions can be asked to see if they have improved. Using tools, like Osmosis assessment items linked to videos, can help measure students’ performance alongside their confidence and link students to resources to help close knowledge gaps.  
  5. Student-to-instructor ratio: Some types of active learning, like problem-based learning and case studies, require small groups of students assigned to an instructor. Meanwhile, others, like asking questions, can be done in a large lecture hall with only one instructor. 
  6. Instructor interactions: During active learning, students should be encouraged to learn from each other, search out answers they do not know, and ask clarifying questions. The instructor is there to help guide the learning experience. 
  7. Establishing expectations: Active learning often involves discussion and movement about the classroom. It is best to set clear objectives around the class learning outcomes, guidelines for group etiquette, and accountability for completing work. 
  8. Virtual environments: Many types of active learning can be conducive to a virtual environment and facilitated simply through breakout rooms or polling questions. Even asynchronous materials can be prepared with modules that include instruction broken up by questions or short activities to be completed before moving on to the next learning piece. 

Interested in learning how Osmosis can support active learning in your program? Schedule a call today.

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