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Flipped Classroom and Active Learning Strategies

Active learning involves providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject.

Active Learning Methods

The Flipped Classroom Field Guide is a compilation of best-practices and community resources centered around the flipped classroom and blended learning initiatives of the Coursera-partner community.

The Flipped Classroom Field Guide

In Teaching College, Norman Eng blends good pedagogy and marketing insights into a handbook that will help anyone who teaches college, or even high school, teach more effectively. In Cult of Pedagogy's 50-minute podcast interview, he shares five specific strategies college teachers could use to dramatically improve their instruction. An article by Jennifer Gonzalez is also included.

Listen to the podcast and read about 5 tips for student engagement on Cult of Pedagogy's website

Backwards Design Resources

This online teaching guide from Vanderbilt University explains the benefits of incorporating backward design. Then, it elaborates on the three stages that backward design encompasses. Finally, an overview of a backward design template is provided with links to blank template pages for convenience.

Explore the online teaching guide: Understanding by Design

Understanding by Design is a book written by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe that offers a framework for designing courses and content units called “Backward Design.” The backward design approach has instructors consider the learning goals of the course first. The backward design framework suggests that instructors should consider these overarching learning goals and how students will be assessed prior to consideration of how to teach the content.

An article from The Teaching Commons at Georgetown University explaining backward design and how you build your course not around predetermined assignments and activities, but around the skills and knowledge you want your students to gain from the experience.

Learn more about backward design from The Teaching Commons

Digital Tools for Interactive Learning

Grids are the meeting place for your classroom, your school, your department or any learning community to discuss your Topics.

Start with an icebreaker, add weekly reflections, share book talks, explore STEM principles, give mini-presentations, any Topic to ignite discussion.

Discover Flipgrid by visiting their website

See the Educator's Guide to learn how to use Flipgrid

Create a learning game or trivia quiz on any topic, host a live game with questions on a big screen or share a game with remote players, and join a kahoot with a PIN provided by the host to answer questions on your device with Kahoot.

Discover Kahoot by visiting their website

Miro is the online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere. Whether your teams are colocated, distributed, or fully remote, Miro provides an engaging, intuitive, in-person collaboration experience with multiple options for real-time or asynchronous teamwork on an online whiteboard. 

Miro’s infinitely zoomable canvas and web whiteboard enables you to work the way you want to. Unleash your creativity, plan projects from all angles, and create centralized hubs of information to keep everyone in the loop. See the big picture and the details.

Discover Miro by visiting their website

Mentimeter is a tool to create interactive presentations & meetings, wherever you are. Get real-time input from remote teams and online students with live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&As and more.

Discover Mentimeter by visiting their website

Perusall allows instructors to upload documents for learners to read and annotate. These annotations become discussions on the document as students comment on each other’s ideas.

Discover Perusall by visiting their website