Lectures in the Digital Era
Here are the high-tech tools and revolutionary methods college professors and other teachers are using to give updated lectures in the digital age.
- Real-time feedback and assessment: Providing students the means of submitting questions, answers, or comments while a lecture is underway is one of the hottest ways to revitalize the college classroom experience. “Clickers” — simple handheld devices that allow students to wirelessly submit answers to multiple choice questions from their desks — have been in use around the country since the early 2000s and could be found in the palms of as many as half a million college students in 2010, according to The New York Times.
With the prevalence of smartphones, some profs are finding it easier to use students’ own mobile devices for the same purpose. At the National University of Singapore, assistant professor Adrian Roellin uses software called questionSMS to poll students via text message before and after a lecture to gauge what they know coming in, what they learned, and how they felt about the lecture itself (too slow or too fast).
Some profs are harnessing social media to ramp up the dialogue between them and their audiences. In 2009, a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas began requesting questions and comments via live Tweets during class, which she then projected on the screen at the front of the class as discussion prompts. Some teachers are taking to Google Moderator to not only take live questions from students during a lecture, but allow them to vote up those that they most want to see answered. - Peer instruction: One of the oldest proponents of the “new” lecture is Harvard’s Eric Mazur. One day, frustrated over his inability to get his students to understand a point, the physics professor offered to let them discuss it with each other. In three minutes, they had it figured out. Thus was born what Mazur calls his “guide on the side” teaching style that he’s been promoting and practicing since the release of his 1997 book, Peer Instruction.
Today Mazur has effectively ditched the lecture, speaking at the front of the class only “a few minutes” to introduce a student-raised subject and polling the students for an answer. Mazur told us he uses assessment software called Learning Catalytics to compile the answers, which allows students to respond via laptop, smartphone, or tablet. If there is not a clear consensus on the question, Mazur turns things over to the students, who are charged with finding a classmate with a differing opinion and arguing their case.
Because his is the only Physics 11 section at Harvard, comparison with similar classes is not possible. But Mazur told us exam performance increased significantly as a result of his introducing peer instruction. More importantly, students’ understanding of concepts improved, instead of their ability to pass tests with the “bag of tricks” they had picked up. Mazur says on the Force Concept Inventory — an assessment test for Newtonian physics — the normalize gain for his students tripled after he switched to peer instruction. - Restructured setting: Any effort to shift the focus of a class away from the lecture should really begin by adjusting the environment; you can’t very well expect anything other than a lecture in a lecture hall. For the University of Minnesota’s Rochester campus, officials opted to ditchthose halls entirely.
Rooms don’t have fronts. Instead they have wheeled furniture so students can collaborate in small groups. The notes they jot on their dry erase boards can be easily photographed by cameras hanging from the ceiling and saved to a laptop for future reference. The class is flipped, meaning students are expected to come to class having read the material already, because any lecture they will get will be brief. Perhaps most important of all, the school has changed the teaching environment by making learning research a requirement for promotion and tenure.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário