PROMOTING ACTIVE LEARNING THROUGH THE USE OF CASE STUDIES: EXPERIMENTS IN ACTIVE TEACHING IN GRAPHIC DESIGN COURSES

Nowadays, it becomes a must reconsider what students really need to learn and the environment in which they learn in because of the new methods in teaching and learning have become more and more technical, the new Net Generation students and the digital environment with its new online culture such as “instant”, “virtual”, or “multi-media”. There are so many rules and various methods students should learn to achieve successful outcomes. This phenomenon made many educators confused about academic goals, the educators in graphic design fields have been faced with lack of interaction between practical and theoretical disciplines for successful academic achievement. This all create new challenges in graphic design education and make educators think of how we should structure design education in a digital environment.

Active learning has received huge attention over the past several years. Often presented or perceived as a radical change from traditional instruction, Active learning has attracted strong advocates among faculty looking for alternatives to traditional teaching methods. Active learning can be defined as “any instructional method that engages students in the learning process” (Prince, 2004). Develop students’ intrinsic interest in the subject matter, emphasize learning as opposed to recall, promote group work, and help students become self-directed learners. As the mostly required in graphic design education, students achieve multiple creative abilities and to be aware of important factors in professionalism relating to digital technologies.
The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of using active learning model in teaching graphic design in higher education. As numerous research studies suggest, teachers who desire increased student learning should adopt active learning. This paper, defines active learning, discusses its value, offers suggestions for implementing it, and provides case studies examples of active learning in graphic design courses.

The paper conceder Case studies in teaching are a good direction and strategy for educators. It offers an accessible yet challenging student based teaching method. Case studies can be used to bring new insights to problems through discussion, role play and analysis.

Thus, this paper brings up questions about how we should structure design education by applying a case study in some practical courses, and how we define boundaries between pedagogical and active models.