University of Ottawa’s Dr. Colin Montpetit issued a bold challenge to his fellow instructors during his webinar on student engagement success last Thursday.

He believes so strongly in his new active learning approach that he wrapped up the webinar by laying down the gauntlet. In his own words: “I dare you to try it at least once – I’m pretty confident that it will result in an amazing experience in the end.”

Dr. Montpetit discovered active learning as he experimented with ways to capture students’ attention in a 3-section course with over 200 students per class. He was frustrated with the lack of participation in his classes, where many students were bored, and unengaged – even catching up on their Z’s. The age old “sage on the stage” approach wasn’t cutting it.

He ultimately found his secret weapon in the Echo360 student engagement system and saw student engagement levels soar by 49% after introducing the solution in 2014.

Using the cloud-based system, he was able to drive engagement using diverse question formats to quiz and poll his students. They in turn participated anonymously using their own laptops, tables and smartphones with no additional cost to them.

He created what he calls a “3-legged community” where he could talk to students, students could talk to him and students could talk to each other, fueling collaboration and enhancing preparation for labs and team testing. The emphasis on collaboration strengthened peer-to-peer learning and helped his students perform better on the team portion of his final exam.

By eliminating the stress of public participation, his students were empowered to engage fearlessly with Dr. Montpetit and each other.

Now 89 – 99% of his students were actively participating during class. Instead of sleeping or surfing social media sites, they were asking questions in droves and submitting an average of 5-10 questions per session.

In addition to using the solution to participate, students now had a one-stop shop for taking notes and annotating and bookmarking slides. This freed them to focus on the task at hand, ask and answer more questions and literally “be in” the lecture.

Once he established that active learning was working to boost engagement, he followed his research instincts to explore what impact, if any, it had on actual student outcomes.

He discovered that both exam scores and overall course scores improved for all students. Prior to the introduction of active learning, 15-20 students were failing his class per semester. After he began using Echo360, this number plummeted to only 6 per semester.

While failure rates decreased, the performance of students who typically earned higher grades also improved.

He calls Echo360 an enabler for increasing class performance. By transforming his classes into an “active learning zone,” he succeeded in engaging his students, defeating device distraction in the class room and most importantly, improving learning outcomes.