Active student participation

Encourage students to share their learning resources, interact with each other and participate in online activities.

Rationale:

• To encourage active participation, and self directed and peer learning.
• To enable students to take charge of their learning.

Here are some ideas of how you can encourage students to actively participate in their learning using online tools:

• Online activities are used to inform face to face activities. E.g. students are asked to research and discuss a topic online in groups, prior to sharing these more widely in a face to face session.
  Further information on active participation

• Collaborative activities are encouraged, such as asking students to contribute to a wiki of shared knowledge; or share useful resources via a forum.

• Students are guided through a series of tasks (using branches and optionally questions) using the Moodle Lesson activity, or similar.

• Further information on scaffolding learning using collaborative activites. (Structure)

• Students reflect on their own learning using online tools (such as blogs, wikis, forums).

• Students complete set tasks and lead the topic discussions. This may count as their attendance (for distance learning courses) and/or form part of their assessment.
• Online communication tools are predominantly used to question, clarify and debate the taught concepts, rather than answer administrative queries, although a space for these is provided.

A guide is available from UCL on encouraging active learning