C an you teach a student to think like a scientist in a class that works like a video game? Ariel D. Anbar believes so. A professor in the School of Earth and Space and Exploration at Arizona State University, he has earned a reputation as an innovative designer of online, interactive science courses for students who aren’t majoring in science.
The inspiration for his work stems from his frustration with the traditional lecture format. Early in his time at Arizona State, Mr. Anbar taught general chemistry. He won a teaching award, but felt nevertheless that it was a “dismal learning experience.” Presenting 200 students with a series of PowerPoint slides and a host of material to memorize is exciting for exactly no one.
Understanding science, he says, is not the same as mastering facts. It requires that you develop problem-solving skills based on logic and reason. Design a hypothesis, test it, and learn from it. The typical researcher masters just enough content to ask a good question. “That’s how he learns,” says Mr. Anbar. “This is the way we ought to teach.”
Meet some devoted faculty members who might spark your interest in taking risks and trying new things in class.
He wondered: If you design a science course like a video game, immersed in a world of choices, can you teach such skills? At other universities, Mr. Anbar says, his question would have most likely been dismissed. But at Arizona State, which has invested heavily in online, adaptive and interactive education, he was given the green light to explore his idea.
Together with Lev Horodyskyj, an instructional designer at Arizona State with a gaming background, and Smart Sparrow, a company that makes an adaptive, interactive technology platform, he designed “HabWorlds,” which stands for Habitable Worlds. The online course, which has received support from NASA and the National Science Foundation, introduces astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology and physics to nonscience majors as they explore the search for life beyond Earth. They must find and describe hypothetical habitable planets through interactive tutorials in which they test ideas in a simulator, which tells them whether they’re right or not. For example, after watching a short video on types of stars, students are asked to hypothesize which ones live the longest. Then they run a test and are told whether their answer is correct.
Mr. Anbar runs the Center for Education Through Exploration. It opened last year to develop coursework that builds on the ideas behind HabWorlds, such as a series of open science lessons for students of all ages called Infiniscope. The center also leads the Inspark Science Network, created to share knowledge about adaptive and innovative science education, in collaboration with Smart Sparrow and backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Rahim Rajan, a senior program officer with the foundation, says Mr. Anbar has tapped into two parallel movements. One is toward interactive, project-based learning in STEM fields. The second is to introduce new technologies to science education.
“I credit Ariel for having the wisdom to try to bring these two things together,” he says. To make things even more interesting, he’s adding them to online courses. “That’s really innovative,” says Mr. Rajan.
Mr. Anbar says it would be impossible to do his work without partners at Arizona State, Smart Sparrow, and elsewhere. And he says that that may be the future of higher education. “This every-professor-is-an-island model is not a very efficient model,” he says, “when you’re trying to do anything more sophisticated.”
As for measuring the development of critical-thinking skills, Mr. Anbar says instructors can look at how students work their way through a problem. Are they making random choices or systematic ones? Some evaluations of another course he helped create, called “BioBeyond,” and of virtual field trips, he says, show that those students perform better than the ones who took a class or field trip in person.
S o, is any of this high-tech teaching relevant to old-fashioned classroom instruction? Mr. Anbar thinks so. This year he is offering an environmental chemistry course that he last taught in 2011. What seemed acceptable to him then, Mr. Anbar rejects now. Instead he spends two days a week in a traditional lecture format, with a fair amount of student participation required. The third day of the class is inquiry driven.
One week, for example, he asked students to work together to come up with questions that spin off Hurricane Harvey and connect to environmental chemistry. The students picked their five favorites, such as asking about the economics of the chemical industry, which was hard hit after flooding damaged oil refineries and chemical plants. For homework they found resources online that advanced their understanding of the question or provided an answer, which they discussed in a later class.
Developing an online course trains you to be thoughtful and organized about what you are trying to accomplish, Mr. Anbar says. “You can’t just show up with lecture slides that are cobbled together and glue it all together with your clever insights and commentary.”
He believes the lessons he’s learned teaching science are applicable to other disciplines. Content mastery used to be the mark of being well-educated. His father, for example, could always drop in facts or historical references when making a point at the dinner table. But now, he says, his kids can just whip out their iPhones and do the same.
If facts are now a commodity, their value is knowing how to wield them. “If we aren’t using all this technology to know how to do that,” he says, “we’re not meeting the moment.”
Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
Premium
How Eric Mazur came to realize that the traditional classroom lecture had to go.
Premium
A methods-based curriculum could empower students in college and for life.
