Creating a rich and immersive learning journey using differentiated resources and active learning environments

This session will outline the development of differentiated resources and active learning environments, designed to create a rich and immersive learning journey for students on a second year analytical chemistry module. These developments include augmentation of online and face-to-face teaching, including online video tutorials to introduce, explain and reinforce key concepts in advance of lectures and labs; structured reading assignments to encourage autonomous learning; e-notes that complement and support learning in lectures; ‘Peer Instruction’ to encourage active participation during class time; and gamification using medals to indicate progress within a specific topic. Low stakes online tutorials have also been developed and deployed. There can be taken over and over again, with different combinations of questions presented for each attempt. Marks and detailed solutions are provided immediately on completion of the tutorial. This instant feedback and the ability to retake the tutorial immediately enables students to correct misunderstanding and reinforce their learning through retrieval practice. Students can draw upon all of these different resources as much or as little as they want in order to construct their own learning journey. In this session, I will explain how these changes were implemented, the effect it has had on student learning and plans for future developments.