A Comprehensive Study on The Effectiveness of Active Learning Techniques in Remote Learning Classes

Since COVID-19 was declared as a pandemic in March 2020, the world as we know it has changed.Most academic institutions in the U.S. have switch to fully online or remote classes.This abrupt change has left both the instructors and students with a lot of challenges to face, with the most concerning of them all is being able to fully focus and actively engage in a remote classroom.One of the ways to help students in a remote online classroom is incorporating active learning techniques.This paper will study the effect of using different active learning techniques, in a remote classroom, on improving the students' level of engagement and ability to focus.The study will be divided in two different aspects, first: the authors will analyze the students' perspectives on the use of active learning techniques, through a survey-based study.Second, we will investigate the students' scores before and after using active learning techniques in different course modules.The study took place over Summer 2020 and 2021 and covered three different courses, with more than 80 students participating in it.The results obtained are very promising and the authors will be recommending the best active learning techniques to be used in an online environment.