Active Learning Through New 'anchored' Approach

Learning is not memorizing things. Any teaching or learning process becomes failure, if it is not deeply rooted. The reasoning or in depth understanding forms an integral component of any learning. Especially in the case of e-Learning, when huge costs and time are spent in the construction of course wares, care must be taken whether the learners are properly receiving the contents and actively engaged in the learning activities. One fruitful methodology followed by academicians, especially high school students, is Anchored Instruction.

Anchored Instruction is the approach of making learners engaged in the learning process by getting situated in the context. The context can be provided through images, pictures, animations, videos etc. In this direction, the use of YouTube can become a successful methodology where the vast and dynamism of content availability in the Internet can make the learners to get involved in the subject of study. The sophistication available in the technology is that real world contexts or contexts can be created and provided as videos. Similarly, the availability of videos can be organized to suit to the class room needs.

The instructor can use YouTube in the following ways:
a. Organising the YouTubes of interest based on
subject, topic, author, country etc.
b. Preparing questions (Fill in the blanks, MCQ,
Short answer as well as Mini-paragraph types
of questions based on the video contents.
c. Asking the students to collect videos
(YouTube) contents under certain topics, as
assignments.
d. Making students to prepare short YouTube
contents so that they can be edited and
uploaded. This kind of project will give
involvement in the subject.

Learning and Instruction should be organized around an anchor which may be from the YouTube video involving a story, situation, dialogue, or even movie. The significance of such YouTube based anchored instruction can certainly motivate the learners thereby providing enough scope for critical thinking and reasoning leading to an active academic arena.