Teaching

Welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week’s newsletter was put together by Beckie. First up, Beth has a dispatch on teaching with immersive reality from a gathering at Yale University last week. Then I’ll share what a few readers have gained from using activities at the start of lessons, pass along some book recommendations, and note a few recent articles.

How Can Virtual Reality Enhance Learning?

Virtual reality has undeniable appeal. Strap on a headset and you’re flying high above the ground. Put on special glasses and a spaceship floats in front of your eyes. These immersive tools are great for gaming, but what role might they play in teaching?

That was the big question last week when Yale University brought together faculty members, technologists, and others from more than a dozen colleges to discuss their experiments with virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3-D printers. The workshop covered a host of topics, including the ethics of virtual experiences, the impact of immersive storytelling, and how to serve diverse audiences.

The projects the colleges devised were quite varied. Some focused on using these tools to teach students core skills in new ways. Case Western Reserve University, for example, is building 3-D visualization into its new health-education campus so that students can study anatomy through holographic imagery. Using special glasses, they are able to explore parts of the body, like the heart, brain, and cardiovascular system. Professors found that students can learn the material just as well, and even faster, than they would on cadavers.

As for other campuses projects focused on the power of immersion, Syracuse University journalism students are using VR in storytelling. Hamilton College is exploring ways to use 3-D tools to prepare orchestra conductors. Florida International University has built a first-year experience around students working together through VR on a community project. Yale has been encouraging its faculty members to explore the use of immersive reality in teaching. Other institutions are exploring topics in art, engineering, and biology. In several cases HP Inc. donated equipment and technical support to campuses. Educause, meanwhile, has been studying the potential for these technologies on teaching and learning, and will release a report soon on its findings.

I sat in on several of the discussions. And while the possibilities for immersive technology in education were clear, so were the challenges. Many participants wondered how their institutions could encourage faculty members to think about the pedagogical opportunities when the learning curve is so steep and the experiences so different from what they are used to. On some campuses, interest has been limited for these reasons. They also wondered how much they should invest in space, equipment, and training. Many attendees noted the importance of collaboration among instructional designers, faculty members, and IT experts in order to pull off such complicated projects. And they discussed whether the technology should be housed in an innovation or technology center or made available free to anyone who wants to use it. Students have been the leading innovators on several campuses, and the more you keep technology behind lock and key, people noted, the harder it is to experiment.

As one attendee noted, “We’re still in the infancy of answering the question: How do we teach with this?”

I’d like to hear from readers who have experimented with immersive reality in their courses. What benefits did you find? And how did you address the technical and logistical challenges that arose? Email me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and I may share your stories in future coverage.

Starting With an Activity

Recently, we asked what benefits you’ve seen from having students dive into an activity at the start of a lesson. Two responses we received illustrate how the practice can help solve some common problems professors face.

Shelly Lewis, an assistant professor in the department of physical therapy at the University of the Sciences, wrote that she uses an activity to encourage conversation in a large course. She assigns a “Dilemma of the Day,” tied to the content she is about to cover, to kick off discussions among doctoral students in her “Medical Ethics” course. Students debate how to handle the dilemmas, which are real-life examples that Lewis has encountered in clinical settings or pulled from medical journals, in small groups and then as a full class. Among other things, the activity is a way for Lewis to incorporate lots of discussion in a course that has 70- or 80-some students, she wrote.

Nick Kapoor, an adjunct professor of political science at Sacred Heart University, wrote that he runs a “classroom Congress” exercise right before teaching the freshmen in his introductory American-government course about the “inner workings” of the legislative branch. Among other things, Kapoor wrote, the activity illustrates how difficult it is to override a presidential veto. It also gives the class a common grounding that Kapoor can reference in later lessons. “Of course, this is a very oversimplified version of how Congress works,” he wrote, “but it gets the students talking and thinking about how our national legislative body makes laws.” That, he adds, is no mean feat, given the course’s 8 a.m. time slot.

Recommended Reading

Our colleague Ruth Hammond, who compiled her latest list of selected new books on higher education this week, points to two in particular that may interest readers of the Teaching newsletter.

• Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation, by Elaine P. Maimon, shares proposals, Ruth writes, “to restructure undergraduate education, including by having only full-time professors teach foundational, freshman-level courses.”
• Making Sense of the College Curriculum: Faculty Stories of Change, Conflict, and Accommodation, by Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and Ann J. Duffield, is based on interviews with more than 180 faculty members at 11 colleges that “reveal an intense commitment to teaching,” she writes, “along with frustrations over the barriers to modernizing the curriculum.”

Two newsletter readers responded to our request for book recommendations with the same title: Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide by Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent. The book, and a related workshop, “enabled me to make my teaching much more learner-centric,” writes Krishna Vedula, a professor of chemical engineering and dean emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Ken Reid, assistant department head for undergraduate programs in the department of engineering education at Virginia Tech, writes that Teaching and Learning STEM has insights for new and experienced instructors alike. “I re-read the book on a flight last summer,” he writes, “and ended up with roughly 1,000 small, colorful Post-its marking great ideas.”

ICYMI

• GPA is used to determine scholarship eligibility and award academic honors, among other things, despite being “a seriously flawed statistic,” write two Bucknell University professors in The Washington Post. The professors go on to describe their university’s effort to provide more context for students’ GPAs.
• Phil Simon, a lecturer in Arizona State University’s business school, argues on his blog that giving students a real-world capstone project, in which they “get to help an actual organization solving an actual problem,” is worth the effort.
• Momentum against tenure is building, writes our colleague Lee Gardner, in an article that explores what’s at stake. In a related article, our colleague Audrey Williams June describes professors’ efforts to defend what many see as a key protection.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Beth and Beckie