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Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This week:
- I describe Teachly, an app that lets professors track the inclusivity of their class discussions.
- I pass along the newest Chronicle advice guide, on giving students better feedback.
- I share some recent articles you may have missed.
There’s an App for That
Teddy Svoronos and Dan Levy teach statistics. So it bothered them that they didn’t have very good data about what was happening in their own classrooms at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
The two lecturers created an app, Teachly, to provide such data. The app includes student-created course profiles that their instructor can search. That way, the professor can draw on students’ expertise and experience in class. Svoronos has used this feature, for instance, to mention an op-ed on India’s health-care system written by a student during a discussion of health outcomes around the world.
Teachly also allows professors to track and analyze students’ participation. The functionality is a bit low-tech: Someone — a TA, in most cases — has to note who speaks during class in the app, though a future version might interface with clickers. Afterward, however, professors are able to see patterns in class participation. Are there gaps by race or gender? Do a handful of students do most of the talking? Professors probably have a hunch of what the answers are, Svoronos says, but it’s helpful to have data to back it up. In one instance, a student of Svoronos’s complained that he was never called on. Svoronos was able to show the student that he was in fact one of the most frequent speakers in the class.
In addition to keeping track of who does the talking, Teachly also allows comments to be coded as 1, 2, or 3. Professors can use those designations for any purpose, for example to indicate whether students asked a question, made a comment, or built on a classmate’s point.
Teachly is currently free, and Svoronos hoped some newsletter readers might be interested in trying it out. I told him I suspected readers might have some questions about it, including privacy and its business model. Svoronos told me that no one beyond an instructor and TAs who are granted access can see the information about a particular course. So far, the app has been funded by grants and support from the Kennedy School, Svoronos says. The hope going forward is that colleges could buy a customized version and make it available to instructors.
The app has been widely adopted at the Kennedy School, Svoronos says, and is being piloted in a couple of other schools at Harvard. The creators opened it up to a handful of professors at other colleges this year. One of them is Hannah Neprash, an assistant professor in the division of health policy and management at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who attended graduate school with Svoronos.
Neprash expected to see a gender gap in terms of who spoke up in her course on health-care economics, which is taken mostly by master’s students. Data from the course showed that this was true: Women’s participation was disproportionate to their representation. Over the semester, Neprash was able to reduce the gap, she says, using techniques like waiting until five students have raised their hands before calling on anyone.
That’s the sort of effort Teachly is meant to support. Still, Svoronos says, “I don’t see Teachly as a panacea for inclusion.” Such data never tell the full story: It’s possible, Svoronos says, to hit 10,000 steps on your Fitbit running to the ice-cream store. The app is just a tool to give instructors a better understanding of student interactions than they had before.
Are there apps or other online tools that you use to enhance your teaching, whether something like Teachly designed for this purpose, or a more general-purpose tool? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your example may appear in a future newsletter.
