Tag Archives: scientific teaching

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 | 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 | January 9, 2012 · 15:14

Moving backwards in(to) 2012, and for good reason!

“The point is this: If you hadn’t put these big rocks in first, would you ever have gotten any of them in?”

Most of us have received at one time or another an email with this story of the Philosophy professor who first fills up an empty jar with big rocks, and subsequently keeps filling it with pebbles, gravel, sand, water, etc. to illustrate to his stunned students that life’s about priorities. What are the most important things in your life? Which are those big rocks that need enough room before the smaller and less critical stuff comes in? Make sure you put in the big rocks first, because they won’t fit once the jar is full of sand!

Teaching pretty much works the same way. We might all have our favorite big rocks, what we like to prioritize when we decide on how we will prepare a course: “I want to cover this topic” or “I will go through these exercises at the blackboard”. That’s often based on personal preference and that’s fine, of course. But the problem (i.e., not-so-effective teaching) comes when the biggest rock of them all, that ought to be in the bottom of everyone’s jar, is missing. This rock could be labeled “GOALS“, for both teaching goals —what do I want to achieve with my teaching— and learning goals —what do I want my students to learn. That indeed, and not the textbook you will use or the slides you will design, ought to be that fat rock in your teaching jar, or the first thing your think about when planning a course.

Everything else that you need to prepare for a course will find their own space in relation to your big “GOAL” rock. In that sense, designing a course goes backwards: It is what you want your students to be able to do at the end of the course that determines what, how, and why you will teach. Perhaps that “backward design” approach sounds basic, but “it’s a radical departure from the default method of syllabus construction in which we cram the books we’ve already ordered into the available weeks of the [teaching term]“, says Aeron Haynie, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who recently converted to the practice.

Or maybe regardless of how basic backward design may or may not sound, it could seem quite frankly unrealistic, because it will take too much time. Well, at first, it will surely need some adjustments in your thinking habits. Fortunately, many resources are available to supporting you in backward designing your courses. Check out this tip sheet or its more extended version released by Stanford University. Here are also some useful questions to help you start the process.

One pleasant thing you might discover is that spending more time ahead to think about the goals will save you a lot of time on the long run. For example, one common realization by adopters of backward design practices is that chapters and slides that don’t really address the GOALS can easily be suppressed or given as homework, extra reading, etc. So there are often actually less slides to prepare, particularly if you start incorporating more active learning to fulfill your goals. It should then come to no surprise that “Working backwards from goals to tasks” is actually number 1 on this list of “7 things highly productive people do”.

Happy backward design for 2012!

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by | November 15, 2011 · 14:03

PI-JITT-IC: How you can stay in the raft with your students

PI-JITT-IC —for PI (Peer Instruction), JITT (Just In Time Teaching), and IC (Inverted Classroom)— is an ideal instructional synergy to upgrade education.

Are you ready to raft the bursting waters of technology-based education? (photo: Klearchos Kapoutsis, Flickr)

Class time and office hours are no longer the only possibility for students to interact with their professors. Smart phones, SMS, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few) have now invaded students’ lives. As a result, texting and tweeting habits have flooded into your classroom–yes, your classroom too! The question is not so much whether it’s good or bad, but how to adjust to this at-first unwelcome intrusion into the classroom, so that we can turn it into a positive experience for everybody.

Technologies are no impediment to good teaching, nor are they a panacea. Once again, it’s about balance. In our case, we’re asking the following: How can we best make use of technologies to support more effective pedagogies? In a nutshell, that’s what this blog proposes to help answer.

Fortunately, innovative educators and professors have already been putting into practice quite a number of technology-based solutions to the double problem of making teaching engaging and conducive to learning. For example, Sal Khan had the brilliant idea to develop a catalogue of YouTube lectures so that the transfer of information could happen on the home computer, with the option to pause and replay at will. This “inverted classroom” (IC) approach –students no longer sit in lectures that they can watch online– is so popular that it just raised $5 million to expand its efforts. Other successful innovations have been the development of Google Jockeys to teach for example information literacy, or the use of Twitter as a backchannel (or a more specific alternative such as TodaysMeet) during a course, so that more students can give feedback and exchange views during class. Those are only but three examples out of an ocean of bright ideas for technology-enhanced education.

On their own, each of these smart ideas was enough to revolutionize the way we teach. But when wisely combined, these approaches highlight a more modern path for what education ought to be really about.

Clickers in action (photo: Morten Koldby)

One such happy marriage between several strategies (actually including IC) was arranged by Eric Mazur at Harvard University. Previous posts on this blog (see for example Oct. 17,  Aug. 9) have already introduced peer instruction (PI) supported by audience response systems or clickers. A particular strength of this approach is to guide a dialogue between students that promotes deeper learning because students have to explain their reasoning to one another. This practice confronts them with what they actually know, and because they can discuss their explanations with someone they can relate to, they are more likely to retain “why the right answer is right” than if they “hear it from Professor Mazur in front of the class”.  What the clickers facilitate is the interaction, because every student sees how his/her own vote fits with the rest of the class and is invited to react accordingly. Without clickers, it’s much harder for example to count the number of hands up in the air from an audience of 200 students, and the voting is not anonymous. So, basically, anyone could see what the others voted, and decide to keep their own hands up or down.

Now, because PI basically relies on an engaging way to teach by questioning, Eric Mazur shifted most of the information transfer outside the classroom, by adopting an IC approach. In the way he uses IC, students watch a recorded lecture before class, and they come to lectures to do what they would normally do at home: solve problems. But because questions asked in class need to be relevant to the problems students are actually facing, Eric Mazur makes sure he asks his students to report back to him before class on what they don’t understand and what they find most interesting from these lectures. He can then check their answers by email or using some social media software “just in time” to adjust his next class accordingly, thereby adopting the “Just-in-Time Teaching” (JiTT) web-based strategy developed in particular by Gregor Novak at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

So here we are: PI-JITT-IC. Three technology-enhanced teaching methods that already impact learning when used individually. But when combined, the resulting synergy just brings the learning experience to the next level. As a result, we can educate students in ways that were not possible without such technologies. So it’s like rafting down an agitated river not just with the sturdiest tube, the most lightweight paddle, or the most waterproof gear, but with the three together. It adds up to make the adventure more worthwhile. More and deeper learning occurs. And slowly, such powerful synergies reshape what it means to raft, or to teach: no one would think today of sacrificing even one of such innovations. Why not make sure I promote learning in the most efficient way when I teach? After all, why would I go rafting if it’s not with the best equipment?

That’s why Eric Mazur and collaborators just developed Learning Catalytics, a platform that get the advantages of these individual practices together into a single package.

Using this new system for example on their cell phone, students are able to watch and annotate lectures, respond to assignments, answer questions interactively (not just by selecting an answer, but also by drawing it), and keep track of their progress. That’s the birth of a new technology, which again opens up new possibilities, new avenues for education. For example with Learning Catalytics, the “who answered what?” question can be monitored instantly and students are asked to turn around to a student they would learn the most from, based on the distribution of answers.

Stay tuned, because with the recent $40 million funds Harvard just received to promote innovative teaching and learning, we’re only at the beginning of the revolution!

Final note: Quite interestingly, PIJITTIC is almost exactly the name of a real boat ;-) So get ready to raft, sail, or cruise!

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