Active Learning in Lecture-Based Courses

Despite educators acknowledging the pedagogical benefits of active learning principles and activities, large enrolment classes most often take place in fixed-seating lecture halls. This proves challenging to designing creative activities for student engagement. In this article, the authors describe one such creative activity used in an introductory course on the New Testament. “Discipleship Survivor”—an exercise in which each week students voted on which of Jesus’s twelve disciples would be cast out of a boat—proved to be particularly engaging and effective. From their follow-up study with students, the authors highlight principles that will allow other instructors to adopt and adapt their own material to make lecture-based courses more interactive and engaging.