The notion of ‘active learning’ challenges the idea that learners will simply absorb knowledge transmitted by the teachers. The experience of active learning may be unfamiliar to many teachers.
Think about something that you have learned recently. How did you learn it? Have you ever learned anything through active learning? What did it feel like?
Learning through active participation will always involve learners being cognitively active – engaging their minds in their learning. It might also involve an actual physical action (such as making a poster, building a model or doing an experiment), but will always involve cognitive action. Just reading or listening to a lecture is insufficient; understanding is actively constructed by the learner through thinking about the new material, processing information and making connections with previous learning or established ideas.
If you are interested, you can read more about different ideas of learning in Section 5 of Creating open educational resources, an OER course from The Open University:
Allow approximately 30 minutes
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OpenLearn - Week 2: Active learning in practice Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.