Brief Introduction
Actively Learn, www.activelylearn.com, developed by a Seattle-based start-up, is an online teaching platform with a focus on enhancing students’ (close) reading skills. It was initially targeted at K-12 teachers, but the company has been reaching out to college instructors recently. Their basic account is free, and there is also a premium version that comes with some additional features for assessing students’ work.
The basic premise of the platform is that teachers can give interactive reading assignments through Actively Learn, so that students engage with each other and their teacher while reading at home. They are being guided through the text by their teacher’s annotations, questions, and explanations. The platform also allows instructors to monitor their students’ reading progress, and it offers meta-data about where they struggle with the reading, based on the students’ answers to the teacher’s questions. Actively Learn offers pre-populated reading assignments, albeit mostly at the high school level, and teachers can also upload their own texts. In the developers’ own words, Actively Learn’s goal is to help “overcome the limitations of the printed text … by cuing in students on what’s important.”

How does it work? What are the main features?
Teachers can either choose from a set of pre-populated texts that come with annotations and questions, or they can upload their own texts as PDFs, via Google docs, or through links to online articles. Most of the content that is available at this point is targeted towards K-12 students, with the vast majority being texts on current events in the US. Therefore, teachers at institutions of higher education will very likely need to use their own materials.
Once a text has been uploaded to the website, teachers can start turning it into an assignment. They can insert questions to which the students need to respond in-line, notes to guide the students’ reading, links to outside online materials to give the students more background knowledge, and teachers can also add definitions of terms and phrases. Students, then, will see all of their teacher’s annotations, and they will be able to respond to the questions, communicate with each other through a comment feature, and they can also use a “problem flag” feature to let their instructor know that they are struggling with a certain passage.
As students are responding to the embedded questions, teachers can assess the students’ replies by marking them as either “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” or “incomplete.” Additionally, teachers can also comment on the students’ replies. In the assignment overview, teachers have access to metadata that allows them to track their students’ progress—i.e. how much have they already read—and they can also see where students are struggling the most, by identifying “incomplete” assessments, and responding to “problem flags.” Furthermore, the teacher assignment overview compiles all “conversations” that are ongoing about the text among students.

Limitations
At this point, the platform works best with shorter texts, especially online articles, since there is one significant limitation to working with imported PDFs: Questions can only be assigned in PDFs at the end of a page, and not to specific sentences or paragraphs. Converting a PDF to a Google Doc can circumvent this problem, and Actively Learn is also working on brining the full annotation features to PDF-based texts.
At this point, there are no iOS or Android apps for mobile devices. The site can be accessed and used from smartphones and tablets, but the navigation is more cumbersome than on a computer.

Pedagogical value
All in all, Actively Learn is a great tool to help students improve their close reading skills. It allows teachers to expand “contact” hours beyond the classroom, since the online platform offers ample ways to communicate with students, and to check in on their progress. It also allows teachers to better prepare for class meetings, since the students’ responses to questions, their conversations with each other, and the “problem flags” already give teachers an indication about on what they should focus in class.
Actively Learn, in a way, is a tool that helps students to become more attentive readers, by slowing them down, by pointing them to critical passages, and by having them share their thoughts and insights with their peers.

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