Breaking Barriers in Communication: Technology-Enabled Active Learning in STEM Disciplines

Overview and Motivation

Active learning techniques are one way of encouraging students to perform self-monitoring and to develop reflection skills - a recognized challenge issued to instructors in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Although the benefits of active learning in the classroom are well documented, barriers still exist which block its ubiquitous usage in STEM classrooms. While some of these barriers come from historical prejudices in our "content heavy" disciplines, others exist due to more mundane factors such as large class size and reticence of students to participate in our classrooms -- which sometimes seem less amenable to student opinion than they are to correct or incorrect answers.

This workshop will train 20+ STEM faculty (repeating a summer 2007 workshop with 26 faculty) across the country in the development of active learning techniques, developing a repository of discipline-specific activities, and to combine that with training in the use of a Tablet PC-based system which allows faculty to implement such activities utilizing technology-based affordances. These affordances specifically target issues of student participation (via anonymization) and scalability (via web-based technology). Additionally, immediate sharing of student-produced work (via digital projector) is enabled due to the electronic submission procedure, providing a new type of communication format in the classroom.

This workshop and it's follow-on activities seeks to build a community of scholars and contribute to education research on issues of active learning in STEM disciplines. This workshop will:

provide training for faculty in the electronic active learning system and in active learning techniques,
serve as a venue for the interchange and development of ideas on active learning across STEM disciplines,
and educate STEM faculty in the area of human subjects-based research including research and analysis techniques appropriate to such studies.

Participants will be provided a grant to cover the majority of costsi ($1600, specifically) of Tablet PC purchase - the only barrier for most in employing this system. Additionally, instructor usage modes will be explored and feedback from participants will spur multi-disciplinary analysis of active learning.

Outcomes of this work will include 1) creation of learning materials and teaching strategies, 2) development of faculty expertise, and 3) implementation of educational innovations.

Much active learning work in STEM disciplines has been discipline or even course specific. A goal of this workshop is to enable cross-fertilization of ideas, hopefully expanding the range of techniques used and effectiveness of active learning in a number of disciplines. Additionally, the broadening of the usage of ink-based systems beyond the Computer Science discipline (where it has been most heavily used to date) will enable us to explore ink-enabled communication and lecture techniques in a variety of new settings, allowing us to pull together "best practices" from a number of disciplines, to enrich them all.