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John Belcher My name is John Belcher. I’m in the Department of Physics at MIT. I’d like to describe the TEAL program that I’m involved in here. TEAL stands for Technology Enhanced Active Learning. So I’m teaching freshmen Physics-Introductory Physics, using a lot of technology and active learning environment. I’d like to describe what we are doing in both of these aspects-both of technology, and the active learning aspect. Let me first say a little bit about my background. I’ve been in MIT for thirty years. In the early 90s, I taught a large freshmen Physics course in electromagnetism. Everyone at MIT has to take two terms of physics, mechanics, and electromagnetism. So we have large enrollment courses. A particular course I taught at early 90s had seven hundred students. That's normally taught in a passive manner that is it’s a lecture-recitation-three hours of lecture, and two hours of recitations. I would do the lectures and a number of faculty would do the recitations. And for a long time, MIT has not had laboratories associated with those large courses. For smaller versions, there were, but not for large courses, for the majority of the students they didn’t have a physics lab. What TEAL does is a number of things, most importantly, from the viewpoint of a lot of physics faculty is we are reintroducing labs in the terms of some small, desk-top experiments that are done in a class period. Let me tell you what a class period is like. Instead of three hours of lecture and a large lecture hall, and two hours of recitation in groups of thirty, we have students come to five hours of class in the same room. The room is a studio physics room, and has thirteen tables, and we put nine students at a table. And we group the students into sub-groups at that table, three students in a group. Each group of three has a laptop which is networked and when we do the experiments each of group of three has an experimental set-up to measure the phenomenon. For example, they will have an A-to-B converter that feeds data into the laptop. For example, Hall-probed (?) to measure the magnetic field of a current-carrying coil. So, the first thing about this is we are reintroducing experiments back into freshmen physics. The second thing about it is it’s not a passive sense of listening to a lecture. It’s passive. The pedagogy is very interactive and it’s a five-hour that we have them in this classroom and we’ll describe it a little bit. We will give many lectures, ten to 15 minutes of lecture, and that will be broken up by just desk-top experiments, where the students collaborate with each other, doing experiment, also we’ll have students do workshops and problem-solving where the students will solve problems as a group. A group of three will turn in a common worksheet. We have the students grouped according to ability. That is we have heterogeneous grouping. We tried to put in a group of three a range of abilities so that the more prepared students can help the less prepared students. That’s good for both of them. That is common phrase you hear as “I never understood this until I taught it.” And the idea is to get the better prepared students to explain things to the less well-prepared students. It’s good for both of them. For the less well prepared student it’s obvious. And the better prepared students have to formulate the concepts so that they can explain them which really helps, any teacher will tell you, that is really when you start to understand the fundamentals of the subject, that you really think it through and have explained it. So the whole package is much different from passive lectures and recitations. We have them for five hours and we have them work in addition to many lectures, we have them work in groups collaboratively both to do experiments, and to do problem solving and exercises. The other aspect of this I really appreciate is the fact that the experiment is done in the contexts of many lectures. If you look at the normal lab set-up in many places, you have a lab on Thursday afternoons, and the lab is either two weeks ahead or two weeks behind the lecture material. Here we give a mini-lecture and they immediately do the relevant lab and then we come back and discuss the results. So it’s a seamless transition and the experiment is done in context. Right now we are in the prototype phase. We've done this with two sections of 180 students, about 90 in each section. The room holds about 90. We are moving into the large onterm course next term where we are teaching about 600 students in six sections. Of about a hundred each. The staffing cost is about the same as the way we normally teach it. The major cost is the up-front cost of building these new classrooms and the Institute has invested in one of the classrooms in this building and the other classroom. Again it’s a flat classroom with 13 tables and a lot of nice space between them. So that's the pedagogy. That’s the active involvement with the students. They are much more actively involved than the normal lecture-recitation format. We found with this format we get 80% attendance, the students were engaged. With the lecture-recitation format, you have 50% attendance even with the best lecturer. Of course there’s a tradition at MIT of not going to the lectures at large freshmen courses. So this is trying to reverse that tradition-actually get students in and engaged in the course material. And this is working. We have 80% attendance and the assessment shows that students are actually doing better in terms of conceptual understanding than normal lecture-recitation format. And this is just replicating studies that have been done elsewhere. MIT is not pioneering this by any means, but we are in… putting it in place here. Let me talk a bit about the technology because it’s also a big part of it. In particular, electromagnetism is a very abstract subject and students have a lot of trouble with the concepts because there’s not much intuition about electromagnetic phenomenon. The way we use technology to overcome that is we have a lot of simulations and visualizations that are built around a virtual- in virtual spaces, but they mimic the real things that we are doing. For example, one of the experiments we do is to measure the electromagnetic field of a current-carrying coil. After we do that experiment we will have a passive visualization that shows the same experimental set-up, except we add to that things the students can’t normally see. Field lines, for example, or the other representations of the field. So that when you do the experiment, you see the phenomenon, and then you see the visualization that adds thing to the phenomenon that you normally can’t see that are there, but are not seeable. So we are making the unseen seen in the visualizations. We do this in a number of different ways. We have passive visualizations as we make an animation file that shows for example when you put the current through a coil, the field getting established-magnetic field, and when you turn the current off, the magnetic field collapses. Again they’ve just done that experiment and seen the effects that are on point of measurement with the Hall-Probe and then they look at the visualization and they see a global characterization of the field. We can really see spatially all the details in the field- animated as you turn the current on and off. That's a passive visualization. That's very important to get an idea of what’s going on. But we also have active visualizations because there’s a lot of research showing that if you are actively engaged in something that solidifies the learning objections that you wanna take home. So in addition to the passive visualizations, we build these using a three-D animation program that is commonly used by game developers and ?? Studio Imax. And we make movies of those. But we also use active visualizations. We have a couple of ways to do active three-D visualizations. These active and interactive ones are not as sophisticated as the things that are passive. That is we don’t have to worry about lengths of times for the computation. When we are doing a passive animation, we can spend eight hours rendering something and then have it flow by in thirteen seconds. When we are doing something that is interactive, we have to cut down on the details that we are doing because we can’t support that in real life. But nonetheless there are a lot of things we can do interactively. Let me just give you an example, we show particles interacting via culum collision, we show the field lines and we show them settling down into molecules for example. That’s an interactive program that we have both in Shockwave and in Java three-D which allows the students to build molecules. They can click on a particle and move it around in this three-D space. They can change its properties, and they can change the initial conditions, and they can watch to see what happens in terms of their interaction with the environment. Again these are simpler in term of the graphics. But nonetheless, they are three-D, they are fully three-D and you can interact with them. They compliment the passive visualizations in a very nice way. They allow you to interact with phenomena that you see passive visualizations although they are not as rich in terms of graphic detail. So we have a spread of things like this in terms of technology, and again the bottom line is to try to help the students visualize thing that are very hard to see, to visualize things that we normally describe with very abstract mathematics. And to be able to see them in some gut way in terms of what they look like if you are to represent them in a virtual reality. And I think that’s very important especially with electromagnetism where it’s so non-intuitive, and so abstract, and so much math going around. So we have both of these things in the same environment. We have active learning, the collaborative learning of the students. They're actually engaging the material, actually seeing the phenomenon by making measurements of real experiments, and these in using technology to augment the real experiments with virtual add-ons that show you things are really there but you can’t normally see. But we can construct them virtually so you can see. So there’s a lot of power in this-both engagement, and both allowing students to get conceptual understanding of things that are very hard to understand in the abstract. It also changes what you can teach and extends what you can teach. You can get to concepts which are really quite sophisticated that you’d never teach at introductory level because the math is too hard but you can at least you can reach them qualitatively because you have a visualization that shows physically what's going on. And you can get to things like the actual stress temperature (?), and energy flow in a much more robust way than you can even in an advanced course of electromagnetism. And you would never touch these things at an introductory level. So it's not only augmenting the materials that you are teaching, it also extends the range of what you can teach at introductory courses. That’s what we are doing in Physics again this is in a prototype level right now. And next term, we’ll move into the long-term version of electromagnetism which up to now is been taught as electro-station format. This is the large version of 600 students. And we are also working on the mechanics version of this in the studio format. The goal is in, by 2005 to have all of the large electric courses in MIT instructed in Physics taught in this format. We have some smaller courses which are very mathematic for majors which will not be taught in this format. But the majority of the students would go through this active engagement studio format. There’s an obvious question of whether you are to extend this to other large freshmen courses. I think math is the most obvious thing that you could, would be suitable for adapting to this format. Chemistry and biology. Physics has the advantage that just desk-top experiments you can do are straight forward and not too dangerous. If you get into chemistry, you’d worry about toxicity so there’s a lesser range you can do experimentally. I do think however that the collaborative pedagogy, the interactive pedagogy really stands on its own. That is you don’t necessarily have to do the experiments in this format. That the important thing there is engaging the students, have the students work in teams, collaborate and learn from each other. And I think that it intersperses with many lectures. And I think, my personal opinion says it’s a much better way to teach than large passive lectures the ones we have now. In terms of cost, to institute this, the upfront cost of building classrooms, to accommodate this kind of structure, we need two classrooms that hold 170 students a piece to do this for a large freshmen course. It’s not cheap to build. Once we have those classrooms, the staffing cost is been designed to be the same as what we currently use in freshmen physics. There’s a long term staffing cost which, of course, the major cost, is approximately the same in both models. It's really the upfront cost to move to this in terms of classroom space and developing pedagogy, and buying desk-top experiments. But nonetheless, in any discipline, large lecture course in science at the Institute I would hope to see the electro-physics are converted to this format, if it’s successful and the students are learning more by objective assessment. And this would spread to other disciplines as well. There's a lot of research, especially in physics education that shows that this kind of pedagogy is more effective. This is well-established, and it’s just a question of a nerve-show. In terms of moving away the way that we normally teach to what is clearly a more effective way. And I hope in the future, when we get to 2010, 2020, that this is the preferred way to teach the large courses at MIT rather than the lecture-recitation format.
Last Modified 5/31/05 1:33 PM |
