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Working with Faculty to Reinvent the Classroom
Faculty are actively engaged in reinventing the classroom. Here a just a few examples.
Flipping the classroom is a strategy aimed at increasing collaboration, student-faculty interaction, and student engagement.
Instructors try to improve student learning outcomes by:
This model moves toward a student-centered environment and is supported by extensive empirical evidence that suggests students learn and perform better in courses that feature active pedagogies.
Content capture (aka lecture capture) may occur in three modes: solo, studio, and field. As an instructor, you can record lectures on your own using screen capture software, or you can work with Consultation Services staff to discuss options for capturing content in the studio and the field.
Class time can now be spent on group collaboration, discussion sessions, peer feedback/review, and problem-solving activities.
You can use class time to interact with students who work in teams to solve problems. While you can do this in any classroom, you can also work with our consultants to formulate strategies for using the active learning classrooms on campus.
Michelle Driessen and Jane Wissinger, College of Science and Engineering, are two early adopters of the "flipped" model. Previously, each taught large lecture sections, but now use the flipped model to spend more time interacting with students during class time.
Student response has been overwhelmingly positive:
"I fell in love with science because it was exciting to do an experiment and not know what the outcome would be."
Digital storytelling, podcasts, mini-documentaries and multimedia presentations can enliven course material and engage students more deeply in their learning. Creating and publishing multimedia presentations presents an opportunity to create a "participatory culture" in the classroom, one with
... relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.
—Jenkins, Henry. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."
Image from City Spinning (licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)
Student media assignments help students engage in deeper learning, connect to course content, and develop skills in:
Work with Consultation Services staff to plan student media assignments and select appropriate technologies.
Sehoya Cotner, Faculty Fellow 2010-11, started her work in multimedia by creating animated vodcasts designed to explain topics known to be difficult for biology students. Cotner then asked her students to produce their own media. She assigned her students vodcasts, through which they presented contemporary work in zoology to a general audience.
For examples, see Zoology Vodcasts submitted by the General Zoology Students at the University of Minnesota, Spring 2011 and the biol1003 YouTube channel.
Moodle is the University of Minnesota’s course management system, and includes communication, collaboration and assessment tools. How might Moodle best be used to foster deeper learning in online or hybrid courses?
Activities such as peer review create opportunities for students to learn cooperatively, and can improve students' higher order skills in synthesis, analysis and evaluation.
The Moodle Workshop tool is used for the coordination and collection of peer assessments. Work with Consultation Services staff to learn more about engaging students in deeper learning with Moodle and designing online or hybrid courses.
David Schmidt, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, used the Workshop tool to coordinate peer reviews of students projects in his large format lecture class, which was taught in a hybrid format using Moodle.
