Introduction

Active Learning goes by many names, most of which are as forgettable as active learning. The fundamental tenet is that learning is improved if students (that would be you) are more involved in the process. The question of whether learning is really improved is open to debate, but it is certainly true that students seem to enjoy active learning courses more. The laboratories in this course and other computer science courses are examples of active learning, and some of those methods will be seen in the lecture part of this course.

The approach that we will be taking is that instead of lecturing over large bodies of material, I will be giving short lectures over topics and then using teaching methods that get you involved in the learning process. There are two issues to be considered: if I don't lecture on topics, how do you get the important information about computer networks, and how do you know what to study for. The answers are that you have to read the book and other materials on your own and you will have lots of opportunities to try to guess what's important, as well as to demonstrate your mastery of the material.

There are a number of problems with active learning; it takes more time and therefore less material gets an actual classroom appearance, it is easy to let the logistics of active learning dominate classroom time and there is a danger that cognition of important topics is actually reduced. We will try to avoid any of these, and you will be asked on a regular basis about the cognitive results, as well as about how well the class is meeting your expectations.

Cognitive Levels

According to a fellow named Bloom, there are 6 cognitive levels:

K	-	Knowledge	-	basic facts you need to know, at least for the short term.
C	-	Comprehension	-	basic principles discernable from basic facts.
P	-	Problem Solving	-	problems you should be able to solve given facts and principles.
A	-	Analysis	-	concepts that you should be able to discern from the body of material by deductive reasoning.
S	-	Synthesis	-	given facts and basic principles, produce something new; a new design or a different approach.
E	-	Evaluation	-	evaluate and critique different methods based on what you have learned.

In general, a traditional lecture format gets to the first two levels. A laboratory course attempts to get to the next two levels, and possibly higher levels. In a lecture course with regular homework assignments, you would get to the Problem Solving level and possibly to Analysis, but probably not beyond that. In a senior-level course, it is important that you get to the higher levels, and that hasn't happened to any great extent in the past. Hopefully, times have changed.

The Active Learning Organization

The first two levels, K and C, are what you would get from a lecture or from reading the book and other materials. You will be expected to come to class prepared for a particular topic with the related materials read and with any specific questions that you have about the topic. In order to assist, you will be given lists of terms to know and questions that you should be able to answer. The idea is to spend as little class time as possible on this part of the material, but not to minimize the importance of it either. Clearly the above list shows that the higher levels depend on adequate understanding of the K and C levels.

In class, each topic will use a variety of methods to improve the understanding at the higher levels. For some topics, Problem Solving is more important, in others it could be Analysis, Synthesis or Evaluation. The higher levels are also more likely to require the blending of information from multiple topics to get a desired result, and so they will become more important as the semester progresses.

Since we operate under the American educational policies that treat educational advancement as a meritocracy, some means of evaluating learning performance is necessary. Quizzes, exams and grading of some intra-class or extra-class assignments will be done. Some grades will be stricly individual and others will be based on group work. In the case of group work, you will also be required to provide feedback on the performance of group members. This is a difficult issue for some students, but I would expect you to be as judicious in your evaluations as you want your classmates or me to be.