Research has shown that students learn better when they participate in the process of learning, which does not occur during “traditional” lectures where instructors deliver the information and students are expected to sit and listen. To help students learn the course material, I have incorporated active learning opportunities in many components of the classes I teach.
Interactive lectures
I prepare pre-lecture notes that I give to students prior to the lecture, which essentially include topics, main mathematical expressions and examples. In class, I use a tablet computer to complete the missing information, which mostly include the solution of examples. The annotations are saved and given to students as post-lecture notes. Lectures are also recorded and made available to students. During lecture-style classes, students do not feel required to write down the projected annotations, and hence they are more likely to participate. The interaction with students is enhanced through the use of short quiz questions, when they are encouraged to talk to each other to construct their answers.
Some of my lectures follow a flipped-classroom style, where students work on programming activities using IPython notebooks, either in collaboration or individually. Each activity brings a real-world example where they need to apply concepts covered in the previous lectures. These follow a guided-structure such that students can complete the assignment on their own, but they can also get help from their peers, from one of the teaching assistants in the classroom, or from me.
Read more: Bringing additional real-world examples to lecture
Collaborative learning activities
Large classes are often linked to smaller discussion sections, where students have the opportunity to work on problem solving skills. Historically, teaching assistants assigned to discussion sections were expected to solve a set of given problems on the blackboard, while students copied the solution. According to feedback, students did not get much out of these sections, and therefore attendance was low. In Fall 2013, I overhauled the discussion sections for an Introductory Solid Mechanics course, creating group collaborative activities where students solved open-ended design problems, and/or hands-on activities.
In Fall 2020, motivated to get students to interact in the classroom while teaching Numerical Methods, I flipped the lecture format and developed new collaborative learning activities. Students are now assigned to groups of 3-4 (either in-person or Zoom breakout rooms) where they work together to complete the IPython notebooks using PrairieLearn. Computational exercises are synchronized in real-time and provide automated feedback to students.
When students collaborate, there is often a rapid exchange of ideas that challenge students to think deeper on the underlying engineering principles. The learning goals for such classes do not only include understanding of technical content, but also practice of soft-skills such as creativity and critical thinking.
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