Module 4: Principles of Learning Design and Active Learning

My Experience: Passive vs. Active Learning

Personally, I have found the balance of passive and active learning in this course to be extremely helpful in being able to apply and generalize the concepts I am learning. In most other courses, I find that most of my learning is done through passive learning, where I am simply learning the foundational knowledge, but then I am expected to find ways to apply it on my own in order to study for assessments such as quizzes and exams. In other courses, I have often found it rare to have many forms of active learning being used. For this reason, I really enjoy how this class has allowed me to learn foundational knowledge through some of the readings and resources, but then there is always an aspect of active learning that allows me to use what I have learned and put it to use in a real-life scenario. I feel that this method of learning has helped me understand how the concepts that I’m being taught are useful, making it more likely that I will use what I have learned outside of school. Even just simply reflecting after learning something new can be a great way to actively learn, as you will only be able to reflect on the things that were truly meaningful to your learning. I have also found that the task of reflecting allows you to understand a topic better and identify how the concept can carry weight in your personal life.

Designing a Lesson Based on Merrill’s Principles

An example that came to mind when learning about Merrill’s principles, specifically the first one on solving real-world problems, was the topic of climate change. Not only is this issue a real-world problem that we are constantly working to combat, but the learning done on this subject is pertinent to many generalizable subjects in school. For instance, for this subject, I would promote learning through a foundation of knowledge, as suggested by Merrill’s second principle. This can be done by teaching the learner about the states of matter, environmental change, ecosystems, and understanding the impacts of greenhouse gases. While these are all topics that are taught in most curriculums, they pertain to an authentic problem and are easily demonstrated and applied by the learner. In applying these topics, I would likely start by demonstrating the main ideas of these topics through teaching and interacting with the science at play, and then have the learner apply the knowledge through an interactive activity. Examples of these could be a drag-and-drop game about the water cycle, or even an image juxtaposition where the students had to identify which image of an environment was before and after climate change. This application of the knowledge learned can then be a great segue into the real-world knowledge that the individual is gaining, as they are seeing how a simple science lesson plays a large role in the environment that they live in.

H5P & Creating Interactive Activities

Upon learning about H5P and designing some activities on my WordPress site, I was a bit confused about how to correctly create them. However, I found that the tutorials for each of the activities were very helpful in learning how to make them. In my current work as an Education Assistant for elementary school students, I feel that in the teaching context, I would mainly be utilizing activities such as quizzes, charts, fill in the blanks, and interactive videos. I found these activities super neat to create, as I realized how many activities would be extremely beneficial for many of the children that I work with. For instance, as I work mainly with neurodiverse children, I would perhaps use the image pairing tool to help a child understand associations of words and pictures. Additionally, I find the ability to make the activities more inclusively accessible is very important, as many learners who are non-verbal use a communication device, thus the ability to add speech is incredibly useful. Creating this activity also gave me a lot of perspective on just how much active learning is present in our daily lives and how easy it can be to incorporate these activities into our learning. Of the activities that I experimented with, I found that the drag-and-drop activity was the most difficult to create, while it only needed a few resources. The process of creating this one was interesting to me as it required you to select all of the fillable spaces first, then create any text that you wanted to add, and then finally label what text matched with each blank space.   

My Lesson Plan

For my lesson plan, I decided to base it on my background of working with elementary schools students and plan a lesson the zones of regulation that are often taught to young children starting out in school. The zones of regulation are used to help kids visual their emotions and feelings and find helpful tools to regulate them in various settings.