Tag Archives: active learning

by | January 20, 2013 · 17:50

Flipping, clicking, MOOCing into 2013!

Just like Bono, we believe on this blog that technologies can help the world be a better place. Focusing on education is long-term planning for raising new generations of deciders. But it demands constant updating to the technologies that emerge and gain in popularity among students and teachers. Below are some of the pointers to where education is going in 2013.

FLIPPING | In the past two years, we’ve reported a few times on the ‘inverted or flipped classroom‘, which consists in having students watch lectures at home and solve problems or exercises during class. “If they’re going to have their iPods all the time, might as well put a lecture on it,” says High school Chemistry teacher Jennifer Goodnight in an interview for the US National Public Radio. The flipped classroom movement has taken off quite successfully, as it seems to “make helping students easier for everyone“— for the most part because shifting lectures outside class turns class time into help sessions.

At universities, Peer Instruction seems to be a suitable choice to flip classrooms. Julie Schell from the Peer Instruction Network just released a Quick Start Guide to Flipping your Classroom. You can also download the guide as a PDF. See illustration below for a handy visual rendering of the student and teacher roles in a classroom which has been flipped using peer instruction.

CLICKING | Of course Peer Instruction relies on effective ConcepTests or clicker questions. Stephanie Chasteen from the Science Education Initiative (SEI) in Boulder just shared again the extensive collection of clicker-related resources available on their website. Clicker questions may be readily available for you if you teach in a discipline that’s also in their course archive. For other clicker question collections you may want to check this list, also on the SEI site.

MOOCing | Massive Open Online Courses have been a tsunami in higher education since their first inception about a year or two ago. Having Ivy League US universities start offering online courses for free was just a revolution, as attested by the >100,000 people that would register for a single course!

MOOCs are the ‘next big thing’, although their place in education is not all clear yet. Will they destroy or merely supplement the traditional university system as we know it? Although it’s true that MOOCs right now are a wake-up call for most colleges in North America, what will their impact be on universities across the globe? Will universities flounder as MOOCs will be rising everywhere? Maybe some universities or departments will disappear, but most likely not all. After all, not everything can be learned online. However, it’s to be expected that MOOCs will not just serve as advertisement for on-campus courses, as proposed by Randy Riddle at Duke University. The thousands of students who sign up for online courses at Stanford don’t all want to go there, nor do they care about MOOCs or on-campus programs offered by smaller colleges or universities.

In any case, now’s probably a good time to start getting involved in teaching online courses. Start small, and start locally. See for example how you could teach only a module of one of your existing courses completely online. We (blog co-author M.G. and I) have been doing just that for a module on “Digital Learning Design” which is part of a professional training currently restricted to new recruits at our Faculty. The experience has been quite positive, so we are now proudly continuing and expanding into 2013!

Whether you will be flipping, clicking, MOOCing, or doing it all at the same time, we’d like to wish you a happy and successful new year 2013!

The World of Massive Open Online Courses
Presented By: Online Colleges

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by | September 13, 2012 · 20:19

Will ‘tabletcasts’ revolutionise education?

As most educational researchers would probably agree: active learning is more effective than passive and letting learners synthesise and create a presentation of curriculum will probably yield high-level cognitive processing and thus good learning results (cf. Bloom’s Taxonomy in Krathwohl, 2002). Yet how can this be facilitated in the classroom without changing everything and still build on existing (good) practice and learning materials? First-hand experience tells me that overnight technological revolutions of teaching practice are seldom successful. Therefore, in order to let the revolution quietly begin, at least three technological requirements have to be met:

  1. It must be possible – to some extend – to reuse existing learning materials and practices
  2. It must be possible for learners to create something (with these existing and/or additional materials)
  3. The learners’ process of creating something with the technology should happen in-class (i.e. the technology should be mobile)

‘Tabletcasting’ (almost) anything with Explain Everything

Two very common learning technologies in today’s practice are PowerPoint and the blackboard. Much teaching can be (or is) carried out using these technologies and learners are familiar with their use for learning and teaching. By enabling teachers to develop digital materials based on existing PowerPoint presentations and learners to easily create and share new presentations in-class using these materials, the basis for an ‘inverted classroom’ is emerging (cf. Lage, Platt & Treglia, 2000; and some of Eric Mazur’s work).

Currently several educational institutions are experimenting with iPads in the classroom. Some are using them for note taking, simulations, data analysis, textbooks, and mind mapping – i.e. remembering, understanding, and analysing according to Bloom’s revised taxonomy – while others are using them for letting the learners create something – i.e. ‘putting elements together to form … a coherent whole or make an original product’ (cf. Krathwohl, 2002). First results indicate that it is possible to use iPads for creating and sharing material in class and that the Explain Everything app might be a good tool for bridging the gap between the traditional setting with PowerPoint presentations and blackboard and the active, inverted classroom where the learners are synthesising and creating. Explain Everything imports PowerPoint presentations, lets the user narrate the slides, make doodles, and import images, and exports the finished product to Dropbox, YouTube, or as a regular flat MP4 file for further sharing (see demonstration in this promo video).

So while we are waiting for a high penetration of tablets, we can think about the design of the learning setting and the materials.

What is a ‘tabletcast’?

The word ‘tabletcast’ is a contraction of tablet (i.e. the mobile device) and broadcast and covers all kinds of materials that are both made on and designed for use on a tablet-PC (e.g. an iPad or similar) and making good use of the device’s technological features. By ‘good use’ it is meant that the tabletcast contains elements which have been developed directly on the tablet and/or contains interactive or multimedia elements.

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by | August 16, 2012 · 17:16

Frontiers in Science Teaching: Clickers, Peer Instruction and the Inverted Classroom – Check Out the Videos!

Last June, our Centre for Science Education co-organized with Turning Technologies a 2-day symposium on science teaching on the main campus of Aarhus University. Over the two days, the conference drew a crowd of 130 educators, researchers and academic developers and received very positive feedback.

You can now watch –or rewatch– the two keynotes by Prof. Eric Mazur, the keynote by Prof. Simon Bates, the world launch of peerinstruction.net by Dr. Julie Schell, and three of the five 10-minute talks by Associate Professors and PhD students who have changed the way they teach at Aarhus University.

All videos can be accessed here or from the main page of the conference website via the sidebar on the right. We will be posting videos for the remaining talks as they get processed.

We hope these videos will inspire you at the dawn of the upcoming academic year!

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by | August 13, 2012 · 23:18

The first day of class is approaching… what will you do?

The first day of class is as important as the first 5 minutes of a movie or the first chapter of a book: If the tone is not set right, who will feel motivated to read on, watch the movie until its end, or stay for the entire course? Unfortunately in many cases the first lecture or presentation of a course is reduced to sharing the course description in details and jumping right into the course content, sometimes even letting students leave early.


As Prof. Keating does in this excerpt from Dead Poets Society, it’s a good idea to use the first day of class –and now with technology even the time before the first day– to get to know your students, and to let them know more about you. Before the first day, ask them by email to fill in an information sheet they can download on the course website for example, in addition to indicating in that same email all the details about where they can find what information regarding your course. Listen to this podcast for an account on how to organize such a first interaction with students and what to ask them about on that sheet. Have them upload a photo of themselves  if the university’s system does not do that already. You’ll need to know their names in order to be able to relate to them as persons, and here are 27 strategies on how you could do that!

If the Learning Management System at your university has a blog or forum feature, use it perhaps instead of emails to start establishing the community of the classroom. Ask each student to introduce him/herself in a few words and to highlight one thing about themselves that is out of the ordinary. You can do the same about yourself and invite everybody to comment on each other’s post. Any other person interacting with the students during the course like the teaching assistants should be joining the forum as well. Plus it’ll be helpful to digest the information if there are more than 50 students!

Now, on the actual first day, here’s a 4-minute long video with good advice on what to focus on. During that first class period, you should organize simple activities to continue the dialogue started via the discussion board before the first day. Get the students to vote by show of hands for example, or have some class discussion, and start learning to put the names on some of your students’ faces in the process. Choose some activities which already reflect the way you like to teach, and use that also as an opportunity to explain to your students how you expect them to behave and respond as a result. Remember, some teaching strategies might be completely foreign to most of them. So for example if you’ve decided to use clickers, explain why you use clickers and find a way to use them right away on that first day, like with opinion polls.

These activities should be centered around the really important informations about your course, such as some guidelines for studying, for passing the exam at the end of the course, for the use of smart phones during class time, etc. Be bold –or open, rather!– and ask students what they think about your policies. Offer to modify them according to their opinions.

These and other tips –see for example here and here– will help ensure your course is set on the right trajectory from the outset. In the following classes, don’t forget to keep spending some time to practice knowing the names of your students and to reiterate the benefits of your chosen teaching strategy until the students are familiar with your methods. These efforts will help them feel your commitment to their learning, and they’ll remember you for it, in addition to remembering what you taught them!

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by | April 10, 2012 · 23:16

The answer to less cell phone use in class is more cell phone use in class!

“Being able to use my cell phone as a means of participation in the classroom was a great experience”–Courtney Schaefer, a first-year student enrolled in an introductory course on Management at Rutgers University

When faced with a challenge, one has typically three options available to deal with it: (1) to do nothing—which is merely a coping mechanism, as the same challenge will return, usually intensified; (2) to reject it—often based on a feeling that the challenge is “unfair”, that it “is not for me to resolve”, etc…; or (3) to embrace it—with an attitude of curiosity and a determination to turn that challenge into an opportunity for fruitful transformation.

Cell phones have been first perceived in education as a nuisance by teachers and educators. All of a sudden, teachers found themselves having to compete with these portable devices for attention in the classroom. Such an intrusion into the classroom made for quite a challenge after centuries of teaching “behind closed doors”, sometimes leading to additional issues of classroom incivility.

Naturally, the initial reaction for most was to first ignore, and then ban cell phones from the classroom, and/or to sanction students who were seen using their cell phone during class. In the meantime, the challenge for teachers intensified as cell phones only became more smart (!) and sophisticated, offering students not just the possibility to send text messages, but also to get online, to download any ap instantly, and to get on Facebook or Twitter in a second, … How would even the most captivating teachers be able to win the battle for students’ attention against such smart devices?

In that context, would cell phone prohibition still constitute the best course of action? Or could we find ways to embrace proper cell phone behavior, and perhaps even use cell phones as devices to monitor and improve learning? After all, if each student now has a phone, why not make use of their phones?

That’s what professors like Jessica Methot at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA sought out to do. Using the free polling software Poll Everywhere (check here for a video overview of that tool), Methot’s students were able to provide feedback up to 3-5 times per lecture using any portable device, cell phone, smart phone or laptop. Through such interactions, both Methot and her students discovered the fun and the efficiency of teaching using audience response systems, together with the freedom of not having to rely on a proprietary piece of software or a specific—and more costly—equipment. Evidence for enhanced learning came from students’ grades for the exam having increased by 3 points on average.

Prof. Methot’s effort to embrace electronics in the classroom are not unique—click here for an example of how a high school mathematics teacher used Poll Everywhere—, nor are the types of audience response systems available for portable devices. Several professors at the University of Calgary, Canada, have actually been just as successful in incorporating cell phones into the classroom experience by using the Top Hat Monocle web-based clicker and online homework tool. Professors found their students more engaged and students enjoyed the possibility of using their phone because “they already own them and don’t mind carrying them around”.

More options of “clicker aps” for portable devices are now available. I’ve mentioned Learning Catalytics in earlier posts (see on Nov. 15 and Mar. 14), which tells students to who they need to turn to in order to discuss their answer. Learning Catalytics also gets constantly enriched with a broader repository of ready-to-use “clicker questions” aka. “ConcepTests”, for pretty much any field in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and now even art. Other options for clicker aps include the very  user-friendly Socrative and LectureTools, which offers various levels of customization from the least to the most interactive teaching practice, and enabling students to take notes right next to the slides.

Now, albeit perhaps more costly, proprietary aps should not be forgotten as alternatives. ResponseWare developed by Turning Technologies has the advantage of being compatible with the current clickers that might already be used at your institution, while costing half the price of a clicker. A hybrid class setting in which students could choose to use a clicker or their smart phone could be the best compromise for as long as a significant part of students don’t have a smart phone or don’t want to bring their laptop to class (see inset for the results of a survey carried out at our Faculty of Science and Technology last month). Students have also reported issues with using smart phones such as aps that drain their batteries too quickly or connections that are too unreliable.

Student responses to the questions “Do you prefer using ResponseWare on your portable device rather than a clicker and why?” from two introductory courses (one in Physics and the other in Genetics) at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Aarhus University, Denmark (results from a survey conducted in March 2012)

In any case, the number of students who possess a smart phone or a tablet will only increase over time, as specs improve and prices drop. Each of the aps for smart phone/tablet/laptop mentioned here beefs up the students and teachers experiences in some way. So just take your pick and start embracing cell phones in your class!


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