Whether face-to-face or online, it is important to think about how students will engage with the material. Ideally, a course will have a mix of different learning activities, the selection of which is guided by the learning objectives. Traditional learning activities, such as lecturing or assigning readings, are often very efficient at conveying a large amount of information, and certainly have their place. The problem is that, because such activities don't require students to do anything other than passively receive information, much of what being conveyed may go unlearned. In contrast, active learning activities require that students do things in order to learn the material, such as solve a problem, create an example, or generate data. These activities can be solitary or collaborative, and the use of both types can enhance student learning.

Linguistics lends itself well to active learning and collaborative activities, because language is everywhere, and it is not hard to think of activities that require students to generate their own examples of a particular phenomenon or find interesting linguistic examples in the world. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to think more carefully about active learning, both to address the challenges of remote learning, and to discover additional opportunities to incorporate active learning activities.

Try this: Develop active learning activities that all students can participate in

Designing effective active learning activities depends on modality, but even more so on whether the course is being delivered synchronously or asynchronously, and, to some extent, on class size. In classes with an asynchronous option, it is important to design active learning activities that can be implemented asynchronously to ensure that all students have access to the same pedagogical experience.

Here are two suggestions for active learning activities that are fairly easy to implement, and don't need to be assessed in order to provide benefits for learning.

• Polling: Intersperse lectures with polls, either using Zoom's polling feature or software such as Poll Everywhere.
• Think-pair-share: Pose a short problem to students, providing them time to think about their answer individually, pair with a peer to discuss their solution, and then share their findings with the class.

If you can do a bit more, try this too:

The activities mentioned above require fairly low investment for both instructors and students. Other activities involve significantly more investment, such as:

• Discussion board: Use your LMS to create discussion boards, either class-wide or for small groups
• Student presentations: Student presentations are often used at the end of a course to present final projects, but student presentations can be used throughout the course as well.
• Flipped classroom: In a flipped classroom, content is delivered before class, either through readings or prerecorded lectures. Class time is devoted to solving problems, completing assignments, working on labs, etc.
• Create an architecture of engagement: Implementing active learning activities will go a long way to increasing student engagement, but engaging students can be thought of more broadly. This is particularly important in remote teaching, where the structures that support learning in face-to-face instruction are substantially different or absent. In "Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes", the authors discuss student engagement in a way that goes far beyond active learning, paying special attention to how aspects of course design can enhance student engagement. Three aspects of course design are particularly relevant to student engagement:

Additional resources for active learning

• Planning and Developing Learning Activities, by Boise State University's IDEA Shop (A division of the Center for Teaching and Learning)
• Active Learning for Your Online Classroom by Columbia University's Center for Teaching and Learning
• Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms, by Derek Bruff, Director of Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching