In week 11 we dived into really learning and understanding what is active and passive learning. First, we looked at how gamification could be used as a method of teaching to really engage the audience with the material provided. After watching the video on Historia, it showed how that you could experience learning History by going back in time and living in the world where the history is supposed to be learned in the form of a game. This elevated version of gamification made it so the students would talk about the game and actively talk to each other about the history. The competition aspect makes the students want to succeed in the game and to be successful the students would have to learn the history so that they would have an advantage compared to their peers. The only thing that I think could have been improved is that I see gamification not being accessible for everyone and games are really hard to create so that they fit UDL Guidelines so that everyone can have the same positive experience in the game. To support this method of learning I think it would be greatly beneficial to incorporate other multimedia tools such as sketch notes or infographics so that there is more of a path to learning other than for the students to basically just figure everything out in the game.

In this course, I have found that there is a good balance of both active and passive learning. Having the material delivered to us in many forms such as videos, articles as well as having us discuss in our groups, I found that the use of both active and passive learning was very present. I loved the aspect of being able to share our ideas we learned during the week in a blog post as well as meeting with our groups to discuss the content. Also if we would ever need extra help we could go to office hours or ask questions via email or Mattermost. My other classes are quite lacking in terms of ways of learning as they would mostly be lecture based and test based while having a teams or slack channel to ask questions. I also found that the response time in other classes can be quite slow so it was quite easy to be behind and not have the support to bring yourself back up to speed. The different methods of teaching really helps engage us as a learner and I think that is the main thing other classes lack.

When trying out H5P, I thought that it was definitely a very useful resource that can help you easily incorporate different methods of teaching so that your content can be more engaging. The one thing I would suggest when using H5P is to be careful to not overwhelm the learner because SECTIONS and TPACK says that sometimes keeping it simple is better than overloading the learner. To incorporate this in this week’s blog I decided to throw in some questions about computer networking that can be used to help engage the learner in a method other than just reading. I think that H5P has a lot of potential and I am honestly surprised that I don’t see it being used more often.

Additionally, this week we also learned about the term scaffolding which is used by teachers to help students when they learn something new or want to improve at a skill they already know how to do. Scaffolding is defined as the process through which a teacher adds supports for students in order to enhance learning and aid in the mastery of tasks. My personal experience with scaffolding comes from being a swim instructor and teaching swim lessons. This is seen when teaching swimming skills in progressions like when wanting to teach someone how to do freestyle we first break down the skill into smaller manageable parts. This is done by first doing body position (practicing gliding as well as floating) then by adding our kicks, and finally also adding our arms. By teaching them separately we can work on them independently before merging them to complete a skill. Another time we use scaffolding is when providing feedback to the swimmers we not only give verbal feedback but we also do many different forms of feedback such as physical manipulation and visual demonstrating the skill.

References:

Mathers, B. (2017). Wikipedia – Active vs Passive learning. https://bryanmmathers.com/wikipedia-active-vs-passive-learning/ CC-BY-ND (images for Active/Passive Learning interactivity)

2-interactive videos. Video-Editing. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://uviclibraries.github.io/video-editing/h5p.html

YouTube. (2014, February 11). Game-based learning brings the history of civilization to life. YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2EV8nLeBK4