Lec 14 MIT CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace

my name is John belshire I'm in the department of physics at MIT uh I'd like to describe the teal program that I'm uh involved in here teal stands for technology enhanced Active Learning uh so I'm teaching freshman physics introductory physics using a lot of technology and in an active learning environment I'd like to describe what we're doing in both of those aspects both the technology and the active learning aspect let me first say a little bit about my background I've been at MIT for 30 years uh in the early 90s I taught the large freshman Physics course in electromagnetism uh everyone at MIT has to take two terms of physics uh mechanics and electromagnetism so we have large enrollment courses in particular the course I taught uh in the early 90s had 700 students in it that's normally taught in a passive manner that is it's lecture recitation 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of recitation uh I would do the lectures and a number of Faculty would do recitations and and for a long time MIT has not had uh Laboratories associated with these large courses for smaller versions there were but not for the large course for so for the majority of students they did not have a physics lab what teal does is a number of things most importantly uh from a view point of a lot of physics faculty is we reintroducing labs in the terms of small desktop experiments uh that are done in the class period let me tell you what a class period is like instead of uh 3 hours of lecture in a large lecture hall and two hours of recitation in groups of 30 we have the students come to 5 hours of class in the same room the room is a studio physics room uh it has 13 tables we put nine students at a table and we group the students into subgroups at that table three students in a group each group of three has a laptop which is networked and uh when we do experiments each group of three has an experimental setup uh to measure uh the phenomenon for example they will have an a TOD converion that feeds data into the laptop and for example a hall probe to measure the magnetic field of a current caring coil so the the first thing about this is we're re reintroducing experiments uh back into freshman physics the second thing about it is it's not passive in the sense of listening to a lecture is passive the pedagogy is very interactive in these 5 hours that we have them in this classroom and let me describe a little of that we will give uh many lectures 10 or 15 minutes of lecture and that will be broken up by desktop experiments where the students collaborate with each other uh doing the experiment also we will have students do workshops and problem solving where the students will solve problems as a group a group of three and turn in a common worksheet we have the students groups according to a ability that is we have heterogeneous grouping we try 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 uh a common uh phrase you hear is 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 uh the less well prepared students it's obvious is uh the better prepared students have to formulate the concepts so that they can explain them which really helps any teacher will tell you that that is really when you start to understand the fundamentals of the subject that you really think it through when you have to explain it so the whole package is uh much different from passive lectures and recitations uh we have them for 5 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 uh problem solving uh exercises the other aspect of this that I really appreciate is the fact that the experiments are done in the context of the many lectures if you look at the normal lab setup in many places you have a lab on Thursday afternoons and the lab is either two weeks ahead of or two weeks behind the lecture material here we give a mini lecture on the material and they immediately do the relevant lab and then we come back and discuss the results so it's a seamless transition and the experiments are done in context right now we're in a prototype phase we've done this with uh two sections of 180 students uh about 90 in each section the room holds about 90 we're moving into the large on term uh course next turn where we're teaching about 600 students in six sections of about 100 each the Staffing uh cost is about the same as the way we normally teach it um the major cost is The Upfront cost of building these new classrooms and The Institute has invested in uh one of these classrooms and it's building another classroom again it's a flat classroom with 13 tables and a lot of nice space uh between them so that's the pedagogy that's the active involvement with the students they're much more actively involved than the normal lecture recitation format we find with this format we get 80% attendance the students are engaged in the lecture recitation format you would typically have 50% attendance even with the best lecturer unfortunately this a traditional MIT of not going to the lectures in the large freshman courses so this is uh trying to reverse the that tradition actually get the students in and engaged in the course material and and this is working we we have 80% attendance and the assessment shows that students are actually doing better in terms of conceptual understanding than the normal uh lecture recitation format and this is just replicating studies that have been elsewhere done elsewhere MIT is not pioneering this by any means but we are uh in U uh putting it in place here let me talk a little bit about the technology because that's also a big part of it in particular electromagnetism is a very abstract subject and students have a lot of trouble with Concepts because there's not uh much intuition about electromagnetic phenomena the way we use technology to overcome that is we have a lot of simulations and visualizations that are built around virtual uh in a virtual spaces but they mimic the real things that we're doing for example uh one of the experiments we do is measure the magnetic field of a current carrying coil and after we do that experiment we have we will have a passive visualization that shows the same experimental setup uh except we add to that things that students normally can't see fuel lines for example or other representations of the field so that you do the experiment you see the phenomena and then you see the visualization that adds things to the phenomena that you normally can't see that are there but are not seable so we're making the Unseen seen in the visualizations we do this in a number of different ways we have passive visualizations that is we make a animation file that uh shows for example when you put the current uh through the coil the field uh getting established magnetic field and when you turn the current off the magnetic field collapses uh again they've just done that experiment and seeing the effects of that on a point measurement with a hall probe then they look at the visualization and they see a global characterization of the field where you can really see spatially all the details of 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 really going on uh but we also have active visualizations because there's a lot of research showing that if you're actively engaged in something that solidifies uh the uh learning uh objectives you want to take home so in addition to the passive visualizations we build these uh using a 3D uh animation program it's commonly used by game developers and in Hollywood 3D Studio Max and we make movies of those but we also uh use active visualizations we have a couple of ways to do do active 3D visualizations these active in interactive ones are not as sophisticated as the things that are passive that is we don't have to worry about length of time for the computation when we're doing a passive animation we can we can spend eight hours rendering something and and then have it Go by in 13 seconds when we're doing something that is interactive we have to cut down on the detail that we're doing because we can't support that in real time but nonetheless there are a lot of things that we can do interactively let me just give you an example we show particles interacting via coolum collisions we show the fuel 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 3D which allows students to build build molecules they can click on a particle and move it around in this 3D space they can change the properties 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 uh in terms of uh the the graphics but nonetheless they're 3D they're fully 3D and you can interact with them they complement the paive visualization in a very nice way they allow you to interact with the phenomena you see in the paive visualizations although they're not as rich in terms of graphic detail so we have a spread of things uh like this uh in terms of Technology again the the bottom line is to try to help the students visualize things 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 uh gut way in terms of what they look like if you 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 there so much math floating around so we have uh both of these things uh in the same uh environment we have the active learning the Collaborative Learning from other students uh being actively engaged in the uh material actually seeing the phenomena by making measurements of real experiments and these in using technology to augment the real experiments with virtual addoms that show you things that are really there but you can't normally see but we can construct them virtually so that you can see them so there's a lot of power in this and both engagement and both uh um uh allowing students to get conceptual understanding of things that are very hard to understand in the abstract it also changes what you can teach it extends what you can teach because you can get to Concepts which are really quite sophisticated that you would never teach at an introductory level because the math is too hard but at least you can reach them qualitatively because you have a visualization that shows physically what's going on and you can get things like the maxal stress tensor and energy flow in a much more robust way than you can uh even in an advanced uh course in electromagnetism and you would never touch these things uh at at an introductory level so it's not only augmenting the material that you're teaching it also extends the range of what you can teach in these introducted courses that's what we're doing in physics again this is uh in a prototype level right now next term we're trying to move it into the on term uh version of electromagnetism which up to now has been taught in elect recitation format this is the large version with 600 students uh we also working on a mechanics version of this in the studio format the a goal is and by 2005 to have all of the large uh lecture courses that MIT introductory physics taught in this format uh we have some smaller courses which are very mathematical for our Majors which would not be taught in this format but the majority of students would go through uh this uh uh active engagement uh Studio format there's an obvious question as to whether you can extend this to other uh large um uh freshman courses uh I think math is the most obvious thing that you could uh uh would be suitable for adopting to to this format chemistry and biology physics has the advantage that the desktop experiments you can do are relatively straightforward and not dangerous if you get into chemistry you worry about toxicity so there's less range of what you could 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 experiments in this format that the important thing there is engaging the students and having the students work and teams and collaborate and learn from each other and I think that in a spers with many lectures and I think my personal opinion is that's a much better way to teach than the large passive lectures that we have now in terms of cost to Institute this The Upfront cost of building classrooms to accommodate this kind of instruction we need two classrooms that hold 117 students a piece to do this for the large freshman courses and that's not cheap to to build once we have those classrooms the Staffing cost has been designed to be the same as what we currently use in uh freshman physics so the long-term Staffing cost which of course are the major cost is approximately the same in both models so it's really The Upfront cost to move to this in terms of classroom space and developing pedagogy and buying desktop experience but nonetheless uh in any discipline large lecture course in in uh in science at The Institute I I would hope to see once physics has converted to this format if it's successful and the students uh are learning more by objective assessment that this would spread to other disciplines as well there's a lot of uh research especially in physics and education that shows that this kind of pedagogy is more effective this is uh well established it's just a question of inertia in terms of moving away from the way that we normally teach to what is clearly a more effective way and I hope in the in the uh in the future if we get to 2010 2020 that this is the preferred way to teach the large course MIT rather than the lecture recitation format