Technology and education

Se ha sugerido que la falta de interacción en clases de gran tamaño se debe a muchos problemas que enfrentan esos cursos: disminución en el registro, poca asistencia, evaluaciones deficientes y baja retención. Ofrecemos una manera de rediseñar el salón de clases para que la interacción sea introducida en muchos aspectos del curso. Este método ha probado ser efectivo para muchos profesores en una amplia variedad de ambientes. Demostraré algunas de las herramientas que hemos desarrollado para promover esta interacción.

It has been suggested the lack of interaction in large lecture courses is to blame for the many problems facing these courses: declining enrollments, low attendance, poor evaluations, and disappointing retention. We offer a way of redesigning the classroom so interaction is introduced in many aspects of the course. This approach has shown to be effective by many instructors in a broad variety of environments. I will demonstrate some of the tools we have developed to foster this interaction.

The LT3 software, a combination of the Harvard ILT and the Erskine BQ programs, is a free, open source, web-based program. Many instructors are excited by new interactive pedagogies like Just-In-Time-Teaching (JITT) or Peer Instruction. LT3 provides an easy way to implement these. Participants will have hands-on experience as they learn: to create and manage courses in the LT3 program; to set up JiTT reading assignments; to access and browse a unique pool of content material, including ConceptTests, physlets, reading assignments and homework problems; to facilitate this content for in-class... Read more about Learning Together Through Technology

Most -- if not all -- of the important skills in our lives are acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Yet we continue to teach using lectures where students passively take down information. Peer instruction is a research-based pedagogy that actively engages students in the classroom and has been shown to dramatically improve conceptual understanding, even in large classes. While successfully implementing peer instruction doesn't require any technology, using the right technology can improve student engagement, increase learning, and make it easier to implement peer instruction in... Read more about Learning Catalytics and ConcepTest development

Data that measures group learning are time-consuming to collect and analyze on a large scale. As an initial step towards scaling qualitative classroom observation, our team qualitatively coded classroom video using an established coding scheme with and without its audio. We find that inter-rater reliability is as high when using visual data only—without audio—as when using both visual and audio data to code. Also, inter-rater reliability is high even when comparing use of visual and audio data to visual-only data. We see a small bias that interactions are more often coded as group... Read more about Exclusively-visual analysis of classroom group interactions

It has been suggested the lack of interaction in large lecture courses is to blame for the many problems facing these courses: declining enrollments, low attendance, poor evaluations, and disappointing retention. We offer a way of redesigning the classroom so interaction is introduced in many aspects of the course. This approach has shown to be effective by many instructors in a broad variety of environments. I will demonstrate some of the tools we have developed to foster this interaction.

Direct interaction between students and their teacher is an essential component of effective teaching. Unfortunately, this component is often absent in large classes. On one hand, lecture periods and office hours offer insufficient opportunities to interact with large numbers of students. On the other hand, electronic communication, such as e-mail or web-based forums quickly become an intractable burden on the teacher. This past year, with the support from the NSF, we developed an effective and efficient system allowing asynchronous communication between students and teacher. The system helps... Read more about How I Got to Know My 200 Students (Almost) Overnight

It has been suggested the lack of interaction in large lecture courses is to blame for the many problems facing these courses: declining enrollments, low attendance, poor evaluations, and disappointing retention. We offer a way of redesigning the classroom so interaction is introduced in many aspects of the course. This approach has shown to be effective by many instructors in a broad variety of environments. I will demonstrate some of the tools we have developed to foster this interaction.

Instructors all over the globe are turning their students' worlds upside down by flipping their classrooms. In a flipped class, teachers typically move information coverage out of the lecture hall so that they can better leverage in-class time to address student misunderstandings and misconceptions about subject matter. In this webinar, Dr. Julie Schell will introduce the flipped classroom technique and its history and present some practical strategies higher education faculty can use to design learning environments that facilitate student engagement with STEM subject-matter both in and... Read more about Flipping the STEM classroom: How to turn your students' world upside down

Research-based interactive learning techniques have dramatically improved student understanding. We have created the 'Interactive Learning Toolkit' (ILT), a web-based learning management system, to help implement two such pedagogies: Just in Time Teaching and Peer Instruction. Our main goal in developing this toolkit is to save the instructor time and effort and to use technology to facilitate the interaction between the students and the instructor (and between themselves). After a brief review of both pedagogies, I will demonstrate the many new exciting features of the ILT. I will show how... Read more about Interactive Learning Toolkit: Tools for the Interactive Classroom