Active Learning in Large Humanities Courses

There has been much research on the value of active learning instruction in the STEM fields. It's clear that such instruction results in more student learning and greater student success, particularly for marginalized students, when compared with continuous exposition by the teacher and when students are fully able to participate in active learning. The 2014 Scott Freeman et al. study is now a classic work on this subject since it offers a meta-analysis of over 200 studies on active learning in STEM education.

I don't know of a comparable meta-analysis on active learning in other fields or even many studies looking at active learning outside of STEM. That's why I was excited to run across the Classical World article "Active Learning Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology" a couple of years ago. I made a note to invite the authors of that article onto my podcast when the podcast was up and running, and this week I make good on that intention!

In this week's episode of Intentional Teaching, I talk with the authors of that paper. Todd Clary is a senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University, Stephen Sansom is an assistant professor of classics at Florida State University, and Carolyn Aslan is a senior associate director at the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell University. All three were involved in redesigning Cornell’s Greek myths course as part of Cornell’s Active Learning Initiative, which has been going strong for eleven years now, if you can believe it!

What I enjoy about the story of Cornell's Greek myths course is that it borrows established teaching methods and course redesign strategies from STEM education and adapts them to the particular teaching context of a large-enrollment humanities course. For example, more than one university has benefitted from what I call the Carl Wieman model of course redesign, in which faculty teaching the course in question are partnered with teaching postdocs from their fields. That model has worked very well in STEM, and it worked great in this Greek myths course, too.

Where Todd and Stephan and Carolyn have really pushed the envelope is in the use of classroom response systems for more open-ended polling questions. In the interview, they talk about their use of word cloud and clickable image questions to engage and assess students in a discipline that's less about right and wrong answers and more about better and worse responses. I'm not sure if I'll get around to a second edition of my Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, but if I do, I'll definitely include some of the example questions the Cornell team shares in this interview!

​You can listen to my conversation with Todd Clary, Stephen Sansom, and Carolyn Aslan here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. The transcript is up on the website, too, for those who would rather read.

Innovation in Higher Ed, or Don't Forget the Gas

Recently I was interviewed about the role of educational technology in higher ed innovation. I'll share that interview when it's available, but I wanted to go ahead and share one thought I had while preparing for that interview.

One of the questions I was sent was this:

If you've read my Intentional Tech book or attended just about any of my teaching workshops, you've probably heard me talk about wheels on chairs as my favorite educational technology. When I enter a classroom with a lesson plan for the day full of student activities, I appreciate it when the furniture in the room can be responsive to my pedagogical plans. Having tables and chairs with wheels means it's easier to move that furniture to support the activities of the day, whatever they might be. I share this to make an important point about educational technology: It should always work in support of our teaching and learning goals, not the other way around.

So how can academic leaders push for innovative technology while maintaining their institution's values and goals? This is an institutional version of the wheels on chairs principle. That is, let those values and goals lead the technology adoption. Are you an institution that prides itself on faculty-student relationships? Then look for technologies for the campus that will support those relationships, technologies that foster social and instructor presence (to use the Community of Inquiry framework). Are you an institution that is focused on getting students ready to enter the workforce? Then see what technologies are in use in the workforce and weave those into the curriculum to teach effective and ethical use of those technologies.

I also have a caution for academic leaders when it comes to technology innovation.

If I can make a 34-year-old reference, consider the movie Back to the Future III starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. In this sequel to the beloved time travel movie, our heroes are stuck in the year 1885 with a very particular time travel machine. "Doc" Brown (played by Lloyd) has turned a car (a DeLorean, to be specific) into a time machine using something called a flux capacitor. This device needs a significant energy source, which is provided by a "Mr. Fusion" reactor borrowed from the future (the year 2015, which in reality produced no such fusion reactors). Mr. Fusion is working fine, but the time traveling car can't travel in time unless it's moving at 88 miles per hour, which is hard to do when you're in 1885 without any gasoline. Getting the DeLorean to hit 88 miles per hour is the problem the heroes are trying to solve in the movie.

Just as Mr. Fusion wasn't any use without gasoline in Back to the Future III, technology innovation in higher education doesn't do any good if the fundamentals of teaching and learning aren't working. Educational technology can't fix a bad course design or an incoherent curriculum. Sure, a virtual reality doppelganger of the instructor powered by generative AI that has read all the instructor's course notes... that sounds fun. But I'd rather see a course with clear learning objectives, assessments aligned with those objectives, and scaffolded learning experience that help students reach those objectives. And like trying to make gasoline in 1885, sometimes it's the course design that's the real challenge when trying to innovate.

Thanks for reading!

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