This interactive workshop will explore effective strategies for implementing active learning in large classes and in classrooms not originally designed to support such methods. The session will begin with a presentation that highlights how spatial awareness and attention to students’ perceived learning moods have been used to design and integrate a variety of active learning strategies in introductory human geography courses. The presenter will share insights into which strategies appear to be most effective, which are less successful, and what these outcomes suggest for best practices in large-class environments. In addition, the session will examine the use of an "examination window" approach and flexible deadlines as tools to promote deeper engagement with course content and reduce student stress. The examination window model involves quizzes delivered through the course learning management system, structured with a variety of question types and accessible over a three-day period. Students are allowed up to three attempts per quiz, with the highest score recorded, and may request additional attempts as needed—providing further flexibility in the learning process. The presentation will include reflections on the strengths and challenges of this approach and its impact on student performance. Following the presentation, participants will engage in structured small-group discussions aimed at generating ideas for addressing the challenges associated with implementing active learning and flexible assessment in similar instructional settings.
This workshop introduces participants to computational thinking and programming concepts through the craft of knitting. Participants will learn basic knitting and how to read a knitting pattern. We will draw parallels between knitting and core programming concepts such as functions, variables, loops, algorithms, and debugging. Participants in this workshop will explore how structured patterns in knitting relate to computational logic. If time permits, they will recreate a knitting pattern using a visual programming environment like Scratch. In all, we hope to inspire teachers to use crafting activities in their classrooms as an engaging, interdisciplinary approach to learning programming.
Assistant Professor, Michigan Technological University
Dr. Jarvie-Eggart approaches teaching and research from a liberation pedagogy. She believes in the empowering value of education in both students and faculty and is committed to creating an inclusive campus environment for everyone. Dr. Jarvie-Eggart's research interests lie in supporting... Read More →
This session will detail and reflect on the implementation of a semester-long video project as an active learning strategy in a Public Anthropology course at Northern Michigan University (NMU). Throughout the semester, students collaborated in small groups to produce a 3-5 minute video that highlighted NMU’s anthropology program and faculty. The goal of this project was to engage students in a hands-on, creative process that both reinforced their understanding of course content and introduced/enhanced their technical skills in public visual anthropology. This session will provide participants with both faculty and student perspectives on the process and outcomes; three students and one professor will share the objectives, outcomes, challenges, and benefits of using such a project.
Online discussion forums can be an effective way to support student interaction and engagement, but they can also become stale and repetitive. In this session, I will discuss how to create effective online discussion activities that encourage students to interact with each other in meaningful ways that support learning. This session will be most helpful to instructors who are looking for ways to increase student interaction outside of in-person class sessions or who are interested in adding or improving discussion activities in their online courses.
As an instructor, I’ve observed that one of the best ways to reveal how well students understand something is to listen to them discussing it with other students. To address common misconceptions in multivariable calculus, I periodically have students use class time to complete small group activities that elicit productive conversations about tricky topics. In this session I will describe 3 such activities.
Active learning and student engagement in higher education are crucial to student success. The session will explore how a pilot experience course using team-based learning enriched with experiential learning and folio thinking promotes deeper engagement and active learning. The course professor and three undergraduate students will provide an overview of the course, share individual experiences with the course components, and discuss teaching strategies to promote middle schoolers' engagement, tested out during their experiential learning sessions at the local middle school. Through open discussion, audience members will learn ways in which they can encourage active learning and engagement in their classrooms.
This presentation explores the implementation of autograded, iterative assessments in a first-year engineering MATLAB module to explore formulative competency-based learning. By providing real-time feedback on computational skills like loops, plotting, and functions, autograding aims to personalize learning and improve engagement. The study details the transition to Mathworks Grader, focusing on evaluating visual outputs and intermediate steps. Student performance, perceptions, and submission uniqueness are analyzed, comparing results to traditional assessments. Findings include reduced problem-solving time and increased student engagement. Challenges in creating diverse problem sets and validation code are discussed. The presentation evaluates the impact of autograding on individual learning and prepares students for future engineering challenges.
In addition to traditional polling, iClicker now offers two new features. The group feature shows students how others in their locally seated group have voted in a poll and strongly encourages them to “reach consensus” before submission. The quizzing feature allows creation, administration, and quick feedback on low stakes quizzes with any number of multiple choice questions. I will discuss a variety of attempts (successful and not so successful) to use both of these features to engage students in my very large (~300 student) and more moderate (~90 student) physics classes Attendees will be encouraged to share any experiences with these relatively new tools as well.
In this session, I will describe my experience facilitating group work in two different classes. In both classes, students were asked to work with classmates to solve problems without explicit instruction on how to do so. Despite the similar structure of the two courses, I noticed the group conversations were higher-quality in one of the courses. In this session, I will argue that three features of the experience, a) the characteristics of the students, b) the nature of the tasks I gave the students, and c) the physical learning environment, affected the quality of the conversations I heard.
Teaching introductory-level, general-education science courses come with their own sets of challenges – including the promotion of active participation, the management of a wide variety of incoming skill sets, and the encouragement of a growth mindset in a course with negative connotations for many students. How can we, as instructors, overcome these additional challenges in an academic environment where the modern student has a short attention span and a need for immediate gratification? This presentation will describe three pedagogical strategies to increase active participation and encourage a growth mindset that have proven to be successful in general chemistry courses.
Python is an excellent language to introduce future programmers to the amazing world of computer programming. Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language. It supports modules and packages. This interactive Python workshop was specially designed for high school students to inspire them to study Computer Science at Lake Superior State University. High school students who visit the University and participate in a workshop on creating drawings using Python have the opportunity of being in a university level class, while being inspired to study Computer Science or programs related to Computer Science.
