Campus example: Casey Gallimore | School of Pharmacy | Case Design and Debrief
These examples were provided by participants of the Blended Learning Fellowship to show how active learning supports teaching and learning challenges in their school, college, institute, or division. The examples reference the work of Michelene T. H. Chi from the article "Active-Constructive-Interactive: A Conceptual Framework for Differentiating Learning Activities," which provides a taxonomy of activities that facilitate different kinds of student engagement with content in ways that support different cognitive outcomes (Chi 77).
campus example of active learning from the School of Pharmacy
COURSE: Integrated Pharmacotherapy Skills
DEPT: Pharmacy Practice Department
SCID: School of Pharmacy
Learning Activity
Within assigned groups, students work together before class to author a patient case. Specific criteria and instructions for case development are provided. In class, each group pairs up with another group and each presents its case to the other. Together the 2 groups work through answering a series of discussion questions provided by the instructor for each case, with each group taking responsibility for facilitating the discussion related to the case they authored. An instructor is also present to help facilitate and redirect discussion as needed.
| Active | Constructive | Interactive |
|---|---|---|
| Doing something physically | Producing outputs that contain ideas that go beyond the presented information | Dialoguing substantively on the same topic |
| Groups writing/typing patient cases. | Students apply and analyze the information they received in the lecture component of the course, by incorporating it into a realistic and novel patient case. | First outside of class students interact and collaborate with members of their small workgroups to develop the patient case. Next, members of 2 different workgroups interact in class by discussing and debriefing each other on the cases they authored. |