How might we foster Active Learning in Higher Education?
My design journey starts with attempting to answer this question.
I discovered that active learning looks something like this:
Do you notice that the students are more engaged with their learning process? Can you see that they are discussing in small groups, appearing to be be mentally focused in a topic and are collectively trying to solve a problem? That’s active learning in action.
After reviewing the literature and experienced first-hand on the active learning problem space, I concluded that overall, the learning community desires to embrace active learning. Unfortunately, there is a strong amount of discord on exactly how to.
There seems to be a great deal of agreement on the benefits that active learning provides, such as better information retention, exercising critical thinking, and increasing class participation. These are all positive and desirable traits to have in a class that is meant to teach people how to learn, especially when viewing learning as a social activity. This is the current dominating view on how the learning process works, but I’m sure this will likely change again in a few years. Yet, no one seems to know how best to implement it, even the most top-notch professionals in the education world are struggling to grapple with this issue. This fuzzy-front end only seems to become clearer, when admitting that learning is such a highly individual process. Thus, I cannot think of better way in explaining this other than with a personal story of my own learning experience.
STORY ON EDUCATION (2000–2017/18)
An undergraduate narrative
I grew up in Toronto, ON and I went though the standard Ontario education system. I did not go to any other schools systems or travel to other countries at any point in time before graduating my secondary education, therefore, I have a strong first hand experience on what this education system felt like.
I am now about to graduate from post-secondary education from a design school in Ontario and I feel rather grateful to be on this project because it allows me to investigate on my own learning experience while I’m learning about active learning, the irony in this is all too funny.
It’s a very interesting topic, as I get to reflect and look back on my own experiences and how it relates to the general reality of the higher educational experience at large. Through this work, I have learned several things and written my insights below.
Active learning is a movement that steams from the need to wake-up a generation of non-independent thinkers. Why do we have so many millennials who are clueless, lost, and overall inept at figuring out their next steps? Well, not to point any fingers or make excuses, it actually is partly due to the fact on how the education system was structured. The Ontario Education board made it their goal to focus on having more students graduate, irrespective of all else. And they achieved this, kudos to them! It radically made a difference in lives of students who needed a leg up. Unfortunately, as most policies do, it also produced some undesirable or unintended results.
With good intentions to be efficient and reduce on costs, as well as policies aimed to mainly help bring up struggling students lagging behind, it has produced a whole generation of experience deprived students who are unable to think for themselves and move forwards because, they were nurtured in a boring environment that only rewards those who follow the rules. These environments included repetitive traditional lecture style teaching that would spoon-feed streams of information to students, that had a tendency to delivered one message, that “school sucks.”
By post-secondary education, it is not surprise that students are more fixated on asking instructors questions like, “what’s on the exam?” or “how much is this assignment worth?” rather than, “could you please repeat those instructions?” or “I didn’t understand this part of the passage, could you please help explain it in a different way?”
Education to this date, has been greatly structured and designed around the principle of being cost effective instead of how trying to provide the best learning experience possible for students. Examples of this includes the trend to increase class sizes, reduce specialized class equipment, or closing down swimming pools, design and technology shop classes, and family studies. I personally remember being the last grade to be expose to machine tools and baking cookies on a cooking element in gr. 7. It is a sad memory of mine, as well as a lot of the teachers at the time, who felt this was a grave mistake. This would not prepare young people in their later years to learn how to cook, build a deck in their backyard, or most importantly, get the special attention every individual student deserves and needs to later become a successful contributing member in society. But hey, that’s how public education goes, so at the time, everyone went along with it.
These policies not only affected the students, it also radically changed the lives of many teachers. We all desire our children to be taught by inspiring and passion-driven teachers; one that may look something like this:
But due to restrictive policies, and an education structure that told teacher exactly what to do in a cookie-cutter format, more and more teachers are beginning to look more like this:
Today, we’re experiencing the results of these policies. The results being, a lack of creativity all around and a bad weather forecast for employers who are wanting to hire fresh graduates that are self-starters and who know how to add value to the company without being micro-managed. The system has produced people who passed the test, but don’t know how to connect two and two together. Why is this happening? When you have a system put in place, that is intended to help students learn, and with students who are genuinely eager to. As well as teachers being given the opportunity to educate the next future generation, who all aspire to be passionate teachers. Why aren’t these goals aligning? Why are so many people dissatisfied with their educational experience?
It is because we are working in an system that has been designed without the users in the center of its decisions.
INSIGHT: Policies that are made to generate short-term gains or/and lacks holistic-focus, will generally produce a host of problems in the system down the road… often manifesting in unpredictable ways.
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THE CHANGE THAT IS REQUIRED
We need a paradigm shift. Education dynamics needs to be redesigned by putting it’s users, the students and instructors, at the center of it’s design decisions.
When we do this, we realize that the system needs to adjust itself to each individual trying to learn. With various types of learning styles and different needs, customizing to each learner can be challenging. This can be best achieved by keeping class sizes small, having flexible classrooms that can accommodate for various activities, and using technology to its full capacity.
The main change that will be caused from adopting this design criteria, will generate learning spaces that are more informal, adaptive, and blended.
