Abstract:

To design the learning experiences for a certain learning objective and to design the proper learning environment that leads the students in the right direction to achieve this objective, one needs to blueprint a certain composition of Active Learning activities. The accurate sequences of these activities, weather before, inside, or after the class will safe-lead the students to construct their knowledge according to the constructivism theory for achieving their learning objective.

In the literature, there are so resourceful sorts of activities that teacher can initiate to the students in this regards. For instance, Salem, A. Z. has proposed a helping mechanism to design learning experiences for Active Learning courses at EDULEARN11. This mechanism aimed at addressing the specific need to transform the learning objectives seeking certain Bloom’s taxonomy domains of learning into learning experiences. It provides a road map that offers many alternatives for any particular design. This road map also factored in the time element of the learning experiences. Examples were provided to illustrate the use of the helping mechanism, ranging from simple to more advanced design. Although, it is hard to think of the design of learning experience as a mechanized process because it is a composition of art and science, this mechanism is offering a good starting point that form the opening point of this paper.

In this paper, this initial design is refined upon implementation, assessment, and diagnostic. We propose an answer for the questions “what type, duration, and composition of activities may lead to achieve the evaluation level learning objective?” and amend them with the following question “How to assess both the success of this learning experience design and the student achievement?”

This paper introduces an implementation of this helping mechanism to design a learning experience that targets the “evaluation” level of learning as it is the deepest cognitive level of learning. This design takes also the affective domain three levels, namely “receiving, responding and valuing” into consideration. The designed learning experience was implemented in a college level course, introducing the students to the engineering design process. Evaluation of this learning experience showed that, it fulfilled its objectives.

Keywords:

Active Learning, design college course, learning experience, class environment.