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Active Learning

Alaska Pacific University believes that how you learn is as important as what you learn. APU has a distinctive educational philosophy called Active Learning, In a nutshell, this philosophy is: “You don’t fully know something until you have tried to do it.” Active Learning teaches students things that go beyond the subject matter of any given course:

Self-direction--conceptualizing and carrying out your own work
Integration--combining your understanding of different subjects
Collaboration--working productively with others
Ethical action--becoming a practical idealist

This kind of learning goes beyond the conventional classroom and the traditional format of lecture and examination. Active Learning emphasizes the relationship between theory and practice. We want our students to try to apply what they are learning and then evaluate both their successes and their failures. We recognize that learning from experience--including one’s mistakes--is an important component of success in every organization, every business, every career, and every life.

Why is Active Learning important? Tomorrow’s leaders need to be able to construct knowledge in response to changing situations. As President Doug North wrote: “If you ask today's social, business, or professional leaders what society needs from higher education, they will tell you that we need more people who are comfortable with creativity, innovation, and the process of consistent change and improvement. There is not a single arena of contemporary life that is not evolving rapidly. In such times, everyone needs to be a leader at some level; at work, in the family, in the community, in service to the world.”

The Active Learning curriculum at APU has a backbone of four main courses (one per year) which all students take:

• Year One: Introduction to Active Learning
• Year Two: The Sophomore Seminar
• Year Three: The Junior Practicum
• Year Four: The Senior Project

Through Active Learning you will learn to take more and more of your education into your own hands, an important component of leadership. This process culminates in the Senior Project, but before you get to your senior year, you will be consistently improving the skills involved in doing a project or a directed study and doing it well. In this process, the faculty will be supporting you (listening to your goals, helping you to shape plans, and evaluating your work), but also challenging you to do your very best work and to look at things from fresh perspectives.