Directed Learning
Directed Learning
It can be a challenge to get students to engage independently with directed learning tasks. Experiment with a variety of tools and strategies to get students engaged with you, with ideas and with each other.
Key Questions:
- How do you get students excited about a topic?
- How do directed learning tasks give students opportunities to develop their understanding of the most challenging information or processes?
- How many different approaches have you tried to introduce new material?
- How do students interact with information, ideas and each other?
- How do you check students' understanding and get their input into the development of further tasks?
The student perspective
Good directed learning was "packed with information you couldn’t find elsewhere, drew conclusions on the information presented and explained how the information was relevant to projects." Graduate Intern
Solent Good Practice
Rebecca Maina describes how embedding audience response activities enables students to engage more deeply with ideas and learn in a collaborative manner. You can have students complete mentimeter activities independently in directed learning, then come together in collaborative sessions to explore results.
Teaching Strategies- Ideas for using visual content, data and polling tools to generate discussion on a topic.
Tools
- Browse for subject-specific audio extracts: acast, soundcloud, itunes, BBC Sounds, stitcher,
- Browse for subject-specific video content: TedTalks, Box of Broadcast
- Mentimeter: Use this polling app to gather student input in preparation for collaborative sessions. The free version allows for up to 3 questions. If you wish to use it extensively contact instructional.design@solent.ac.uk to request a licence.
Resources
- A. Haynes, and K. Haynes, (2012) 53 interesting things to do in your lectures
- P. Race (2015) The lecturer's toolkit: a practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching
- Flipped classroom: See an active lecture in this example of peer-teaching.
- Linkedin Learning (login) > Learning how to increase learner engagement.