Active learning in higher education: what UC Chile's experience reveals

Today's students want everything fast: content that loads instantly, like YouTube, that they can scroll through and jump between. At Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile), faculty call this "the immediacy phenomenon", and it's also the starting point for understanding why active learning has become an institutional priority.

That's according to Alexis Alvear Leyton, Executive Director of UC Chile's Digital Intelligence Vice-Rectory, in an interview about how the institution weaves digital tools, Canvas, AI, and Wooclap into everyday teaching.

A generational shift that's forcing a rethink of the classroom

For Alvear, "we're living through a genuinely significant cultural and generational shift with our students." The rise of social media and mobile devices "has given both the wider community and young people very different ways of learning, and very different ways of relating to one another." The challenge for the university, Alvear explains, is to introduce technology that supports active learning, that motivates students to be in the classroom not just for the content they're being given, but because the learning experience itself is transformational for them.

That challenge plays out on three fronts: training faculty on new tools ("technology moves fast... something new comes along every year"), constantly scanning the market to adopt promising tools early, and perhaps hardest of all, redesigning teaching itself, "so classes stop being the theory lecture, the professor at the front with a whiteboard," and instead become sessions where students "participate" and "voice their own opinions."

Canvas as the backbone, Wooclap as an integrated piece

This is where one of the most concrete points in the conversation comes in: UC Chile doesn't build its teaching infrastructure tool by tool, it builds it around a central system. "Our backbone for managing and delivering teaching is Canvas, our LMS, which includes a wide range of tools that let instructors gradually and continuously monitor how students are absorbing what they're learning," Alvear explains. "And this tool lets you embed things like Wooclap directly inside it."

That integration with Canvas isn't a minor technical detail, it's what allows in-class interactivity (the questions, the live polls, the real-time exercises) to stay connected to the same environment where the professor organizes the course, reviews content, and tracks student progress, rather than living on a separate platform disconnected from the rest of the semester.

AI in teaching: open to it, but within an ethical framework

Beyond classroom interactivity, UC Chile is also exploring AI as a complementary support for learning, something Alvear sees as inevitable: "these days you can't even really ask whether you should use it or not. Students are already using it... so questioning it would just be a waste of time." That openness comes with caution: the university has published its own policies that "lay out something of a framework for how AI should be used," precisely to address risks like bias in information and academic integrity concerns. It's a balance other Chilean institutions are striking too, the University of Talca, for instance, has leaned into AI-driven simulations and gamified quizzes while being just as deliberate about where AI fits into the learning process.

Using session data to adjust teaching in real time

One of the most significant shifts away from the traditional model, one assessment at the start of the semester, another at the end is the ability to monitor comprehension continuously. Thanks to the tools built into Canvas and solutions like Wooclap, instructors "know immediately how it went, which tools worked best" and can "plan their classes around the results they're seeing." This kind of ongoing, low-stakes checkpoint is exactly what formative assessment is designed for. That feedback doesn't come from the instructor alone: teaching assistants, being closer in age and experience to students, "pick up on things and have an intuition that's much closer to what students themselves are actually feeling."

The result, Alvear explains, is a cycle of continuous improvement: "all these tools help us keep refining our classes, keep adapting the content... and keep introducing improvements that ultimately encourage student learning." In essence, it means making teaching decisions based on real session data, not just intuition or a final grade.

From attendance to autonomy: why students choose to show up

With so much information available online, students themselves ask the obvious question: "why go to class if I can just watch the video on YouTube?" The university's answer is to make the in-person session worth more than the content alone: "I go to class because they use tools that are actually engaging, because the teaching method is different, because the professor gets me participating, because my opinion matters." And that has a measurable effect on attendance: "if technology helps us do that, and it ultimately drives student attendance, that's an incredibly valuable thing for us." Small, deliberate moves, the kind covered in this back-to-school checklist for more engaged students are often what tip the balance.

That growing student autonomy building "their own AI agents to help them learn certain material," or "searching YouTube for videos that teach them things" is also an invitation to metacognition: recognizing what you already know, what's still missing, and which tools will get you there. It's the same principle behind personalized learning: meeting each student where they actually are. As Alvear sums it up, the challenge is making sure technology keeps being "something that genuinely invites curiosity and exploration," for instructors and students alike.

One tool, every faculty: from Mathematics to Humanities

Part of the value UC Chile sees in Wooclap is precisely how broadly it applies. "A mathematics professor can use it, a professor in the Faculty of Humanities can use it... it can be taught and used in a faculty like Medicine, which probably has a completely different teaching and learning methodology." Before reaching that scale, every tool goes through an internal validation process: it's piloted "with smaller courses, with specific professors," and only afterward rolled out "at a broader, more scalable level."

"It's a process that starts by looking around: spotting opportunities, tools, best practices, experiences, bringing them into the university, piloting them in controlled groups... and then scaling them up in a way that lets us gradually extend that use to other professors."

What any institution can take from this case

UC Chile's experience shows that active learning doesn't depend on a single tool, it depends on an ecosystem: a central LMS like Canvas, session data that feeds back into teaching week after week, and interactivity that, used well, achieves something as simple as it is valuable: getting students to actually want to come to class.

Does your institution already have the LMS and the appetite to innovate? All that's missing is the piece that connects it all in the classroom.

Try Wooclap today and transform your teaching: wooclap.com