Active learning: how to activate it?

The simplest definition of active learning is that “the students must be active in seeking knowledge and developing their skills.” In this article, we will discuss an important factor that can promote active learning. Active learning includes several strategies that are described as ‘student-centred’, meaning that the ultimate goal of education is to get the students to do the learning on their own, with the guidance of the instructor.

This means that instructors must abandon the ‘direct approach’ to instruction and must adopt approaches like the ‘discussion approach’, the ‘problem-based approach’, the ‘project-based approach’, and the ‘experiential approach’, as well as other approaches that are more or less suitable for different disciplines.

Nonetheless, regardless of the discipline, the most effective approach to learning is the problem-based approach, not only because problem solving is the highest-level intellectual skill but also because every discipline includes topics and issues that revolve around phenomena that must be investigated to find solutions to the problems in that discipline.

This means that the success of this approach depends on the instructor’s ability to ‘problematise the content’ of the course, the content being the various topics and issues that discuss the set of phenomena relevant to that course. Now, the ability to problematise the content of a course requires that the instructor have training in education and that they be a specialist in the discipline of the course. These two requirements allow the instructor to utilise their increasing awareness of the problems in the discipline, as well as their vast knowledge of the topics of the course, to transform the course content into a list of problems that the students have to examine, analyse, and try to find solutions to. In other words, the specialist instructor knows the discipline of the course better and will be in a better position to problematise the content of the course.

When courses are assigned to non-specialist instructors who are not aware of the problems in the disciplines of those courses, courses are delivered using the direct approach, where the instructor reads the textbook, summarises the content, and presents it to the students on slides for them to copy into their notebooks, without much activeness on their part (since the content moves from the textbook to the notebook), which ultimately leads to ‘passive learning’.

Another advantage of the problem-based approach is that, besides getting to know the problems in their disciplines, the students become increasingly capable of solving problems in general. In fact, this is how education should be if we are interested in lifelong learners who are equipped with the skills that allow them to engage in ‘research’ as “creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge” (Wikipedia). In other words, if we want the students to be good learners after they graduate, then we must teach them how to be good problem-solvers.