The workflow was to simply ask faculty to bring their typical syllabus, reading assignments, homework assignments, lecture notes, exams, and project descriptions (if any) to a short workshop where we would show them how to convert them to our method. The only time consuming part would be converting their traditional lectures to a set of activities. If they had already generated the learning objectives for each lecture (as all educators should do), then it is a much simpler task.
We ran a pilot in the Fall 2014 with an Materials Science and Engineering faculty member with rather poor results because the room was too crowded, the whiteboards were not delivered until the end of the term, and we had not refined our workflow. But we learned from our mistakes and revamped the program for the Winter term. We wrote the following letter to the chairs of departments asking for them to talk to their faculty and suggest good candidates.
Engaged Learning Environments without the Pain or Time Sink
Did you every wish that you could use some of the teaching methods that CRLT and others talk about but you just did not have the time or energy to try them? If so, you might be the perfect person to participate in our engaged learning environments program this year.
We are looking for experienced lecturers who will be teaching a class or section of a class that has at least 20 and no more than 80 students next winter term.
Our goal is to help you develop an engaged learning environment for your students without spending much more time than you usually do when preparing a lecture style course that you have taught many times in the past. Furthermore, we expect that your students will learn the material in a much deeper way, retain the material much longer, and let you have the most fun teaching that you have ever had in your life. We also expect that you will end up spending far less time preparing for your class the next time you teach it. Our experience has been that the second time a course like this is taught it takes far less time to prepare. Why is this important? A vast number of studies over the past 30 years have demonstrated that active learning, team based learning, and formative assessment and feedback consistently out perform traditional stand and deliver lecture and summative assessment. Yet, more than 90% of teaching at engineering schools is still traditional lecture with summative assessment.
So, how can we do this? We have developed a simple workflow that retains the same syllabus, reading assignments, homework, exams, and even your lectures as the starting point for class conversion. All we do is shift the components to a team based method and use a little bit of technology.
This program is focused on teaching you the details of our no-lecture version of introductory materials science and engineering course as well as our attempt to broaden the adoption of these pedagogical elements across the rest of our engineering college by adapting these methods to your course. Take a look at the MSE course: http://java.engin.umich.edu/220f15 .
Unlike typical "flipped classrooms" the first introduction of the material is provided via reading the text using nb.mit.edu where the students annotate the book and each others annotation. This is followed by in-class peer instruction, hard homework at home that is not graded for accuracy but rather the effort and honesty of a reflection. Testing is accomplished in a formative assessment and feedback technique that has the students take the test individually and then again with their group. The group round is machine graded and results are immediately shown once an answer is submitted. The group score is averaged with the individual score for each students score. There can also be three projects during the term if you are interested. It is actually a lot of fun and not much work to add projects to the mix.
So, if you are game, let us know and we will be happy to talk to you about it. We expect to take on up to 5 faculty for the next winter term. We have resources to help you succeed such as the ability to hire graders and/or instructional aides. If needed your class will be moved to Chrysler 133 where we have 8 double sided whiteboards and Apple TV. We will have a training session or two in November and you will be personally mentored by Steve during the Winter term to make sure that you don't make all of the mistakes that he did and that you can use the tools without having to suffer a learning curve.
You are welcome to visit my class on any Tuesday or Thursday from 3:30-5:30 in Chrysler 133 this term if you want to take a look.
More than 10 faculty responded within the next week. Many more told me that they really wanted to work with us but were teaching classes that were larger than 80 or smaller than 20 students. Still others told me that they were on sabbatical or were already planning on using different pedagogies in their course. The group of 6 faculty members that we accepted into our program (both terms) were from four engineering departments: Materials Science and Engineering (1), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2), Environmental and Water Resource Engineering (1), and Biomedical Engineering (2). Three of the faculty were women, one was an underrepresented minority, one was Asian, and one was caucasian. Three of the faculty were full professors with tenure, one was a lecturer with 15 years of experience, one was an associate professor without tenure, and one was an assistant professor without tenure. We consulted with the department chairs, deans, and promotion and tenure committees before allowing the untenured faculty to participate. All parties felt that the this was a very good experiment for the untenured faculty to participate and would be very understanding if the student evaluations were not good. The courses spanned graduate and undergraduate courses and they are listed in Table 1.
The college of engineering was supporting this work and they purchased a total of 30 double sided white boards (on wheels) for our participants and helped to schedule the rooms so that all of our classes were in flat classrooms. The college also provided up to $2,000.00 to each participant so that they could hire Instructional Aides or graders to help with the course.
