New Active Learning digital resources to support virtual and face-to-face teaching

A library of new digital resources has been launched to actively engage students in their learning.

The Active Learning Initiative (AL Initiative), established by Learning Environments (Pro Vice-Chancellor Education & Student Experience Portfolio), is working with members of UNSW’s teaching community to support the adoption of AL in the classroom.

The AL Initiative identified a valuable opportunity in developing a library of digital resources for teaching staff which provide inspiration, ideas and an exchange of knowledge that can be shared across the UNSW community.

The library of newly created digital resources include:

• ‘Student Engagement. Active Learning’ toolkit series consisting of three toolkits, each of which is a collection of active learning guides, resources and tools for virtual, face-to-face and hybrid or hyflex classroom scenarios.
• The Active Learning Guide and The Active Learning Reference & Research Resource which are both available to download and contain practical suggestions for active learning to take place in class, interactive links to resources and research references.
• 360 Interactive Virtual Tours of Active Learning Spaces which explore the features of a physical active learning space and contain pop-up virtual resources such as audio visual technology videos and 3D furniture layout images of ways you can move furniture around to help plan activities for your students in class. 

The AL Initiative has collaborated with members of UNSW’s teaching community to develop many of these digital resources and has highlighted a number of active learning exemplars. These have been showcased over the past 12 months by various UNSW faculties such as Arts, Design & Architecture, Engineering and Medicine & Health.

Some of these exemplars showcase students participating in class activities such as ‘Gallery Walk’ and ‘Roleplays & Simulations’. These have been designed to enable students to actively engage in class discussion, interact with their fellow students to generate ideas or problem solve. Additionally, they will help develop vital skills for their future careers, such as working as part of a team.  

The vision for this library is to continue to grow its digital resources through a continuous knowledge exchange of ideas, innovative tools and new active learning exemplars, that will be developed and shared across UNSW’s teaching community.

All staff of the UNSW community are invited to explore and contribute to this library by visiting the resources page on the Learning Environments website.