1. The Active Digital Learning Environment: Beyond Using Canvas as a Repository
Dr Isobel Gowers
Director of Learning, Teaching and Assessment (Acting)
Faculty of Science and Engineering

2. Active Learning and the Digital Environment
Active Learning: “Instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing” (Bonwell and Eison, 1991)
6% average increase in student assessment results with active learning (Freeman et al., 2014)
Classroom and flipped learning have been the focus of much of the technology enhanced active learning research
Classroom (Freeman et al., 2014)
Flipped learning (Arico and Lancaster, 2018)

3. Current Practice in Canvas

4. Students Expectations of the Digital Learning Environment
First year biology module
Lecture slides
Quizzes
Interactive tutorials
Wikinotes
Findings
Students claimed lecture notes were most useful digital resource
Quizzes most widely used activity
Only 1/125 students used Wikinotes

5. Discussion
What type of activities do you / could you include or how do you / could you scaffold resources to make the digital environment more active? How do you / could you encourage students to engage with online activities? What are the barriers to success?

6. Some Examples of Framing Videos
Direction – questions for the students to think about
Direction – quiz questions associated with videos
Social learning – discussion forums associated with video
Social learning – external tools, such as Talis Elevate
Creating…

7. Take home messages
Digital environment needs to be more than just a repository if we want to truly embrace active learning
Quick wins → holistic approach
Still gaps in our knowledge in making digital learning = active learning
Are you interested in collaborating on research to further explore how digital active learning works in practice?