DEVELOPING AN ACTIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR ACTIVE LEARNING COURSES.

Abstract

The need to blueprint a certain composition of Active Learning activities arises upon designing the learning experiences for a certain learning objective. Also it rises when designing the proper learning environment that leads the students in the right direction to achieve this objective. The precise succession of these activities, being before, inside, or after the class will lead the student to create their knowledge according to the constructivism theory for attaining their learning objective. In the literature, there are so resourceful sorts of activities that teacher can initiate to the students in this regards. For instance, Salem, A. Z. [1] has proposed a helping mechanism to design learning experiences for Active Learning courses. This mechanism intended at addressing the specific need to convert the learning objectives seeking certain Bloom’s taxonomy domains of learning into a class’s learning experiences. It offers a road map that offers many alternatives for any particular design. This mechanism also counted for the time component of the learning experiences. Examples were provided to demonstrate the use of the helping mechanism, varying from simple to complex designs. Surely, it is hard to think of the design of learning experience as a mechanized process because it is a composition of both art and science, but this mechanism is offering a good starting point. In this paper, we propose an answer for the questions “what type, duration, and collection of activities that may lead to achieve the evaluation level learning objective specifically?” and the question “How to assess both the success of this learning experience design and the student achievement?” This paper introduces an implementation of this helping mechanism to design a learning experience that targets the “evaluation” level of learning and takes also the affective domain three levels, namely “receiving, responding and valuing” into concern. The designed learning experience was applied in a course at college level, introducing the engineering design process to students. Evaluation of this learning experience showed that, it fulfilled its objectives.