Gen Physics - Mastering Physics

Andre Adler – Active Learning in the Large STEM Lecture

Posted on by admin in Analytics + assessment, Discipline, Method, Sciences

Summary

Professor Andre Adler (Physics) uses various online interactive platforms to engage his 350+ General Physics classes. Students engage in active problem solving before, during and after lecture.

Learning objectives

  • Foster engagement to counter restrictions of space
  • Increase opportunities to practice materials and identify points of confusion
  • Facilitate collaboration by offering problems that students work on together

In this video, Professor Adler speaks about engaging students and facilitating learning in a very large STEM lecture course. One challenging aspect of this 350+ student course is that it meets in the Skirball Theater, an amazing space that has fixed, theater-style seating and thus prevents active collaboration.  To counter the constraints of the space, Professor Adler used two online systems to spur engagement and link in class and outside of class activities.

Student experience

  • Access engaging and relevant practice problems before, during, and after lecture
  • Pose questions to the professor during lecture
  • Respond to fellow students’ textbook annotations and questions

Technology resources

  • Learning Catalytics, a classroom engagement system that delivers questions for group problem solving. Responses are entered using a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
  • Perusall, a platform that allows for text annotation and discussion
  • Mastering Physics, a tutorial and homework system that syncs to the textbook and offers pre-class and homework assignments. Pre-class assignments prepare students for lecture and homework assignments explore the concepts further through a variety of problem types not found in the textbook.

Outcomes

Charts, from left to right, asked the students to assess the following:

  • LC helped me to stay engaged during lectures
  • LC helped me to identify points of confusion during lecture
  • LC helped me to review for graded assignments outside of class
  • LC helped me to understand specific concepts

Selected students’ qualitative comments:

  • I thought that overall it was a very useful learning tool. While many science courses have sample questions in class, the fact that Learning Catalytics participation was graded provided an effective incentive to really stay engaged and work on the problems. Additionally, it allowed me to return to the problems later and review the answers.
  • I very much appreciated using the learning catalytics software, and wish that it was a resource for Physics I and any other science course. I liked that it kept us engaged during class, provided a useful study tool for exams, and I especially liked that we got credit for coming to lecture prepared.
  • It made it significantly easier to ask the professor questions, often it can be intimidating to ask in front of the hundreds of other students. Additionally it showed us what other students were thinking, and didn’t make us feel so alone if we got a problem wrong.
Aline Baehler

Aline Baehler – Experiential Language Learning in French

Posted on by admin in Blended + online, Discipline, Language instruction, Method, PBL + collaboration

Summary

Professor Aline Baehler (French) leverages web publishing tools for intermediate-advanced learners of French to use language skills in a realistic, experiential way. Her award-winning Papiers Mâchés and Capsules de grammaire are open source platforms for strengthening existing grammatical knowledge; the Scénarios site is a virtual apartment building where students role play as French-speaking residents.

Learning objectives

  • Create opportunities for intermediate-advanced students to review content learned in lower-level courses
  • Increase feedback for students expanding their linguistic skills
  • Provide immersive experiences to engage with the target language and culture
  • Foster collaboration among students, both in and out of class

In this video, Professor Baehler speaks about a role-playing project in her intermediate-advanced French course.  Students create fictional characters and collectively construct a vibrant apartment building in a francophone city of their choice through text, conversation, and multimedia.  By navigating daily life through the eyes of native speakers, students have authentic ways to explore culture, history, grammar, and vocabulary in the target language.  This innovation addresses the difficulty in providing students with immersive experiences in the target language and culture.

Another challenge of bridge language course is having time needed to review content learned in lower-level courses, while also expanding linguistic skills.  To this end, Professor Baehler has developed two interactive, open-source tutorials that guide students through grammar and writing activities.

  • Capsules de grammaire: provides students with grammar and vocabulary practice
  • Papiers-Mâchés: scaffolds students through the writing process (currently being re-designed for accessibility and user experience)

In both platforms, students receive automatic feedback and can go through the materials at their own pace.

Student experience

  • Engage with lecture videos, interactive modules, and simulations outside of lecture time
  • Participate in hands on lab activities
  • Collaborate on group activities and review material during lecture time

Technology resources

Outcomes

  • Reflect the experiential act of language learning: Learning french30_collagelanguage is a social act, and creating a community where students can share and develop their language skills in a supportive environment reflects the reality of learning another language.  The Google Site also allows students to use language in a highly contextualized way, since they are using French as their fictional character.  
  • Create a participatory environment: Professor Baehler created a participatory environment where the instructor and students were full participants. Instead of completing assignments for the professor, students and professor had a collaborative role in building the online world.
  • More integrated curriculum: Professor Baehler found it easier to tie in discrete aspects of a foreign language curriculum since the virtual environment required students to use grammatical, semantic, and cultural knowledge in an authentic way.
  • Increased motivation: Professor Baehler found that students were more engaged with the language and sought out ways to showcase and use their linguistic knowledge.  Students collaborated and could be creative, adding images and rich background narratives for their fictional characters.
screenshot of google drive

Ben Stewart – Hacking Google Forms for Formative Assessment

Posted on by ds4583@nyu.edu in Analytics + assessment, Discipline, Method, Writing instruction

Summary

Professor Ben Stewart (Expository Writing Program) uses Google Forms as a formative assessment tool in his Writing the Essay course. Students respond to prompts during class that have them revise and edit their writing (and thinking). The instructor has created a script that allows individual student responses to be shared as individual documents with both the students and teacher, simplifying the feedback loop between both instructor and student as well as between students.

Learning objectives

  • Develop informal, in-class writing into substantial texts
  • Engage in peer review

Student experience

  • Complete writing assignments prior to class, as well as in-class
  • Participate in discussion around writing assignment and readings
  • Complete Google form “worksheet” in-class, which includes additional writing prompts and reflection
  • Review peer worksheets and offer feedback

Project workflow

  • Participate in FAS Innovation in Language Teaching workshop, May 2016
  • Develop custom Google Form/script function that compiles student responses into individual student Google Docs (as opposed to standard compilation of all responses into Google Sheet) and shares them with instructor and students
  • Follow up consultations with FAS educational technologist and central partners to simplify workflow

In the video below, Professor Stewart demoes his custom Google form script with a live audience during our Innovation in Language Teaching Conference.

Technology resources

  • Google Docs
  • Google Forms
  • Google Sheets

Outcomes

  • Enables a much quicker turnaround time between student production and teacher feedback

“[This process] is really clean organizationally: the teacher has everything all in one place and doesn’t need to worry about whether the students’ have or haven’t shared x, and there’s no hunting through emails for attachments or links to documents.” – Ben Stewart

Quarks - Spaceship greenscreen

Allen Mincer – Flipping for Understanding

Posted on by admin in Blended + online, Discipline, Method, Sciences

Updated on 1/18/19

Summary

Professor Allen Mincer (Physics) flipped CORE-Quarks to Cosmos, a large lecture course for non-science majors. He developed original content to replace the use of two required textbooks; students engaged with material outside of class and participated in collaborative, active learning activities in class.

The current iteration of the course includes additional resources on background information for primary skills (unit conversion, estimation, dimensional analysis), as well as opportunities for metacognitive activities (e.g., self explanation). 

Learning objectives

  • Increase active learning opportunities for students to engage more deeply with concepts
  • Provide proper support for non-majors learning complex science content
  • Eliminate the need for students to purchase costly textbooks

“No textbook really deals with the material in this course in a way that fits what I wish to teach. But I feel that students need a way to go over the topics covered in lecture, as it is too easy to miss something when it is just heard once.” – Professor Allen Mincer

“No textbook really deals with the material in this course in a way that fits what I wish to teach. But I feel that students need a way to go over the topics covered in lecture, as it is too easy to miss something when it is just heard once,” describes Professor Mincer. The creation of freely available course materials, or Open Educational Resources (OER), allows him to cover topics more efficiently and allow students to use online delivery to review “anywhere, anytime”.  Professor Mincer also developed a custom simulation on the topic of Parallax, which allows students to interact with this challenging topic in real time.

Pairing a flipped course structure with OER plays an essential role in meeting pedagogical goals, such as increasing student engagement and learning.  In the spirit of affordability, OER will also eliminate the need for students to purchase textbooks that they might only need for a single course.

EXAMPLES OF CONTENT
#1. Parallax simulation: Click to access simulation

#2. Video lecture on how the Greeks calculated the size of the Earth

#3. Video demo of the Electroscope

#4. Video demo of the cathode

Student experience

  • Engage with lecture videos, interactive modules, and simulations outside of lecture time
  • Participate in hands on lab activities
  • Collaborate on group activities and review material during lecture time

Technology resources

Outcomes

  • Custom content replaced two textbooks, leading to total student cost savings of over $42,000 per semester
  • Increased scores for students performing at the intermediate and advanced levels
  • Ability for students to review lecture material anywhere, anytime
  • Recognition that future iterations should build in additional remediation needs for students with less exposure to physics concepts.
Microeconomics - Black market

Marc Lieberman – Flipping for Affordability

Posted on by admin in Blended + online, Discipline, Method, Social sciences

Updated 7/12/19

Summary

Microeconomics - supply and demandProfessor Marc Lieberman (Economics) flipped the recitation sections for both of his large lecture courses, Introduction to Microeconomics and Intro to Macroeconomics,  eliminating the need for students to purchase textbooks and platform licenses.  In addition to developing online modules and animations, Professor Lieberman leveraged NYU Classes to create an online problem solving platform.

Learning objectives

  • Provide students with essential review material to clarify points of confusion
  • Reduce the variability in instruction by recitation leaders
  • Eliminate the need for students to purchase costly textbooks and software

Microeconomics_RevenueProfessor Marc Lieberman created Open Educational Resources (OER), freely available course content, to solve pedagogical and financial challenges. Common recitation materials lead to all students receiving a similar level of information about key topics. Content can be customized for lectures, and made visually appealing through rich animations created by the NYU IT Media Production Team. No-cost content and platforms save students money (up to $350 per student).   

Macroeconomics module screenshot

Professor Lieberman worked with FAS (in partnership with NYU IT’s TLT Team) to develop similar resources for his Introduction to Macroeconomics course. These were implemented successfully in Fall 2018’s Intro to Macroeconomics course and will be used again in Professor Lieberman’s classes, as well as additional Economics courses running at NYU Florence, in the coming academic year.

Student experience

  • Go through online modules prior to lecture
  • Attend recitation sections and review material anywhere, anytime
  • Complete problem sets

Technology resources

  • Custom animations
  • Custom interactive modules, for recitation lectures + assessments
  • NYU Classes, for custom problem sets
  • NYU Stream, to house videos

Outcomes

  • Custom content replaced the need to purchase a textbook and interactive software, leading to cost savings of up to $350 per student.  
  • Standardized instruction across recitation sections
  • Ability for students to review material anywhere, anytime
  • Similar project completed for Introduction to Macroeconomics in Fall 2018
  • Example module: ‘How Banks Get in Trouble’ – Click to view module
Visible / Invisible Cities - Student project

Virginia Cox – Creative Critical Thinking

Posted on by admin in Discipline, Humanities, Method, PBL + collaboration

Summary

Professor Virginia Cox (Italian Studies) integrated project-based learning into CORE-Texts & Ideas, Visible and Invisible Cities, a course that focuses on representations of the city since Classical times. In addition to writing scholarly papers, each student had to complete a creative project, critically exploring texts using multimedia and non-traditional technologies.

Learning objectives

  • Develop students’ ability to use multimedia to advance and enhance a scholarly argument
  • Use emerging technologies to broaden the audience for scholarly content

Visible and Invisible Cities centers on the ways in which human communities have been theorized and imagined within the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Renaissance. Activities include close reads of primary texts, rich discussions, and the completion of a creative project. For the creative project, students critically reflect on texts using alternative methods, like podcasting, interactive illustration, mapping, and even song writing.

Student experience

  • Develop and iterate on project idea
  • Post final projects on a course blog, and upvote favorite projects

Technology resources

Outcomes

  • Increase in engagement for subject matter
  • Increase in ability to transfer text-specific ideas to a broader context
  • Project showcase: https://wp.nyu.edu/nyucities/ (open to NYU community only)
screenshot of Venture out project website

East Asian Studies Faculty – Linked Project-based Learning

Posted on by ds4583@nyu.edu in Discipline, Language instruction, Method, PBL + collaboration

Summary

Professors Xiaohong Hou (Chinese), Eunju Na (Korean), and Kayo Nonaka (Japanese) linked students across East Asian Studies through project-based learning. Students participated in authentic, local experiences and blogged in the target language. The instructors wanted students to practice speaking and writing outside of the classroom, as well as a create an online space for peer to peer learning.

Learning objectives

  • Engage with target language outside classroom
  • Practice writing and speaking skills
  • Encourage collaborative knowledge building across languages and skill levels

Student experience

  • Visit a local restaurant, shop, cultural heritage site, or other relevant cultural location.
  • Engage with target language in new setting – through menu, museum exhibit, conversation with native speakers.
  • Using target language, write about experience and share media in a blog post on linked class site.
  • Comment and offer feedback on fellow students’ posts.

Project workflow

  • In-person consultation meeting the instructor and educational technologist to discuss learning objectives and technical specifics
  • Training session with instructors + education technologist to cover basics of web publishing platform
  • Creation of blog with instructor(s) as the owner/administrator and students added as authors
  • Uploading of content to blog by students and grading / assessment by professor
  • Face to face presentation of materials across courses and languages

In this video, Professors Hou, Na, and Nonaka share the process for developing this project, as well as student projects and feedback.

Technology resources

Outcomes


“I learned how to talk more about a topic I was interested in using the source language.”

“I experienced the language as it is used – in real conversations.”

“I got to practice in a real setting.”

“By using Korean outside the classroom, I had to adapt to thinking quickly in order to say what I wanted to say in Korean. I heard the language in a more natural environment.”

microphone and laptop stock photo

Stefanie Goyette – Podcasting for Presentation

Posted on by ds4583@nyu.edu in Discipline, Humanities, Method, PBL + collaboration

Summary

Professor Stefanie Goyette (formerly of Global Liberal Studies) assigned a podcasting project in lieu of a final paper in her Cultural Foundations II course. She knew many of her students listened to podcasts, and wanted to provide a creative means for students to synthesize and demonstrate knowledge.

Learning objectives

  • Work on a team to perform and present research.
  • Properly frame a text for a non-specialist (general) audience.

Professor Goyette developed learning objectives and technical specifics with the FAS Office of Ed Tech. She created her Tumblr blog and offered an in-class session (20 minutes) to expose students to the basics of creating and editing audio.   Leveraging the medium of podcasting challenged students to distill scholarly arguments and gain transferable technical skills that apply to a wide range of experiences.

Student experience

  • Make and edit a basic podcast (20-25 minutes of high-quality audio in which each member of the group gets to speak about the same amount).
  • Demonstrate familiarity with text, original analysis, and research on topic.
  • Devise an interesting format or debate topic to liven up the podcast and provide a thematic core.
  • Divide up project tasks effectively with team.
  • The Tumblr post must include: the podcast audio; any necessary documents or images; Works Cited; outline of who was responsible for each part of project.

Technology resources

  • Audio recording and editing software (GarageBand and Audacity)
  • Freely available music and audio assets (see a list on our website)
  • Microphones and recording spaces (NYU LaGuardia Coop)
  • Web publishing (Tumblr)

Outcomes

“The students loved it and it was mostly very productive in terms of learning.” – Stephanie Goyette