Active learning, as defined by Study Guides and Strategies, is experiential, mindful and engaging. Through it, instructors can explore a set of more effective and interesting learning experiences, allowing them to take more responsibility for their student’s education vs. the traditional or default methods of teaching.¹

Research by PNAS looked at 225 studies that reported on examination scores or failure rates of student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses under traditional lecturing versus active learning. Results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.²

You can explore active learning through:

• Active listening: Intentionally focusing on what’s being said in a conversation, lecture or group. The goal is for students to replay or repeat back what they just heard in their head.
• Seeing: The use of images — pictures, graphs, maps, diagrams and more — and matching these images with verbal cues, such as titles and authors, to help retain information.
• Seeing and hearing: Sharing information through engaging formats such as PowerPoint lectures, multimedia and movies. These mediums have the advantage of illustrating readings and sound bites making them inherently more engaging than listening alone.

To stay on point with the way students prefer to learn and learn best through the use of technology, higher education institutions must adopt technology into the classroom and move away from solely lecturing or even lecture-based models. One way to incorporate technology is through the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs).

IWBs are gaining popularity among universities today due to their ability to help instructors display images, text and video on touchscreen display panels at high resolutions, turning the classroom into an interactive space.

Remote students can go from observers to active participants as they are able to connect with the onsite classroom and see the instructor’s presentation or markups in real time. Multiple students can view and participate at once with standard viewing options, and instructors can videoconference and use picture-in-picture to see remote student participants.

IWBs can also help promote group-work and peer-to-peer learning. In a 2015 study involving higher education engineering students, research found that an IWB played a key role in the learning process of students — helping to promote various styles of learning including: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results also show that the IWB may facilitate a "joint workspace," a social realm featuring student dialogue and interactivity.⁴

Instructors can further promote active learning with an IWB by:

• Using it for more than video and presentation. An IWB is a window to the internet and can be used as such. Engage it for Skype® calls, webinars, online discussion boards and breaking news articles.
• Allowing students to rotate between independent work, an instructor-led activity, and a small-group task done using the IWB.
• Having the students physically use the IWB and reduce the time an instructor spends at the front of the room. Getting students up and out of their chairs is a form of active learning.