Characteristics of Active Learning: Students are engaged in activities other than listening and taking notes, e.g., reading, discussing, writing, problem solving, and students are involved in higher-order thinking, e.g., analysis, synthesis, evaluation.
Characteristics of Cooperative Learning: Students are engaged in activities that involve all of the following five elements:
Using ACL in your
Class
If you're thinking about using ACL in your class here are some ideas that may help you prepare.
People
Here are people you can contact for more information about ACL, in general, and ACL workshops in particular.
Workshops
Educating Engineers for a New Millenium
Active/Collaborative
Learning
Teaming
in the Classroom
Cesar Malave and Jim Morgan offer workshops on active/collaborative learning and student teams in the classroom. They can customize the length (2-16 hours) and coverage of the workshops to suit your requirements.
Links
You can get tremendous resources for active/collaborative learning on the web.
Interactive-Engagement vs. Traditional Approaches for Introductory Physics Mechanics, by Richard Hake: The article compares gains on the Force Concept Inventory by different classes using lecture and interactive-engagement methods of teaching for 6000 students.
The Cooperative Learning Center at The University of Minnesota: The web site contains several articles describing fundamentals of cooperative learning, research support for cooperative learning, and different teaching strategies based on the fundamentals of cooperative learning.
College Level One-Univ of Wisconsin: This site provides a large number of resources for collaborative and cooperative learning and classroom assessment.
Collaborative Learning Bibliography - Penn State: This page contains an annotated bibliography on collaborative learning as well as links to other resources assembled by the Center for Excellence in Learning & and Teaching at Penn State.
Active-Learning-Site.Com Summaries The web page summarizes three research articles that can inform classroom practice and demonstrate the value of active learning approaches.
Cooperative Learning in Technical Courses: Procedures, Pitfalls, and Payoffs, Richard M. Felder, Rebecca Brent: The article provides a good overview on approaches to cooperative learning.