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2016

Getting every student ready for every class, at Education Summit 2016, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile), Wednesday, January 13, 2016:
talk_2598.pdf
Over the past decades there has been a concerted push away from passive lecturing to active engagement in the classroom. A successful implementation of the so-called flipped classroom requires students to come to class prepared, either by reading the textbook or watching a pre-recorded video. A variety approaches have been devised to get students to take responsibility for this information transfer, but none manage to get all students to participate, compromising the in-class activities. I will present a new approach to get every student to prepare for every class using a new social learning... Read more about Getting every student ready for every class
Less is More: Extreme Optics with Zero Refractive Index, at Faculty of Physics Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile), Tuesday, January 12, 2016:
talk_2587.pdf
Nanotechnology has enabled the development of nanostructured composite materials (metamaterials) with exotic optical properties not found in nature. In the most extreme case, we can create materials which support light waves that propagate with infinite phase velocity, corresponding to a refractive index of zero. This zero index can only be achieved by simultaneously controlling the electric and magnetic resonances of the nanostructure. We present an in-plane metamaterial design consisting of silicon pillar arrays, embedded within a polymer matrix and sandwiched between gold layers. Using an... Read more about Less is More: Extreme Optics with Zero Refractive Index
The Tyranny of the Lecture, at Business School, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile), Tuesday, January 12, 2016:
talk_2596.pdf
Most -- if not all -- of the important skills in our life are acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Yet we continue to teach using lectures where students passively take down information. Instead, we should really focus on the assimilation of that information and shift the focus from teaching to helping students learn. Over the past 20 years, instructors world-wide have begun to adopt Peer Instruction to get students to think in class. With the advent of new technology the process can be significantly improved. A new data-analytics driven audience response system does away with... Read more about The Tyranny of the Lecture
Confessions of a converted lecturer, at Tucson Optics and Photonics Winter School, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), Friday, January 8, 2016:
talk_2582.pdf
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly

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