By Michele Hall, Educational Technology Development Coordinator, EDC
The EDC’s Teaching and Learning Symposium is fast upon us, and this year’s theme—Active Engagement: Success in the Classroom and Beyond—has me reflecting on how my own teaching practice has evolved over the years, from passive to interactive, and how it continues to evolve as new educational technologies make possible engaging learning experiences not previously feasible.
When I started teaching, I had pretty disastrous results in terms of engaging my students. My first teaching assignment was at a small-sized Ontario university, where I taught a class of approximately 65 students. I felt very proud of my use of presentation software; I used both PowerPoint and Prezi (new at the time) throughout the term to supplement and enhance my lecturing. I had embedded videos, sound and lots of images to illustrate my topics and grab the audience’s attention. How could the students possibly not be engaged with the multimedia presentations I was giving them?
But engaged they were not! Besides the turnout rate steadily declining as weeks went on, I frequently had to contend with students Facebooking, tweeting, texting or just plain old falling asleep as I droned on and on about contemporary Canadian poets’ understanding of the “image” as poetic concept.
The wake-up call for me came towards the end of the semester, when one of my students let out a shriek in the middle of my lecture; chaos erupted and, as the students around her clamoured, I managed to find the cause of the commotion was the corpse of a large, black cricket that had somehow fallen from the ceiling and onto her desktop. What an omen! “If even the crickets are bored to death in your class,” I thought to myself, “you’re clearly doing something wrong.”
Part of my problem was a misguided reliance on slide software to engage my students. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that slide presentations can’t be effective teaching tools—and I hope to write about how to create engaging PowerPoints in more detail at a later time—but if a lecture is a lecture, a teaching model that encourages one-way communication and places students in a passive rather than active role, adding an essentially (though not exclusively) passive technology such as PowerPoint to the mix isn’t going to magically transform it into an engaging learning experience.
Since my early foray into teaching, I’ve learned that a lecture does not have to be a lecture (from the French word for “reading”), and that one can easily transform a lecture into an interactive lecture or lesson-activity model of learning. An interactive lecture divides the learning time into lesson and activity blocks, creating opportunities for students to apply and/or assess their learning, through discussion, quizzing, brainstorming, role-play, etc., becoming active participants in the lecture. Universities and colleges are rapidly adopting this pedagogical model because it complements recent research indicating that students can only focus on lectures for 15-20 minute intervals. If you haven’t tried interactive lecturing, the EDC offers some great teaching tips and tools to help you get started.
There’s also a whole host of technological tools out there, beyond PowerPoint, that can support interactive lecturing and active learning experiences in your online, blended and face-to-face courses. Some are even available within our own LMS, cuLearn! Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be writing about four prime categories of EdTech tools—including screencasting software, quizzing and polling tools, collaborative technology, and social learning tools—that are fairly easy to adopt and can help you transform your basic lecture into an interactive one. Subscribe to our feed by clicking on the feed icon and be the first to hear about these engaging technologies. Can’t wait? Come and visit me in the EDC, 410 Dunton Tower, and I’d be happy to discuss ways you can incorporate them into your lessons.
Michele Hall is the Educational Technology Development Coordinator at the EDC. She holds an MA and PhD in English Literature and currently teaches Academic and Technical Writing in the Bachelor of Interior Design program at Algonquin College. She’s also a certified peer reviewer for Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization running a research-supported approach to quality assurance in online learning environments.