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2023 HILT Conference
The 2023 HILT Conference comes at a pivotal time when artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly discussed and experimented with in higher education. AI holds immense potential to enhance personalized learning experiences, automate administrative tasks, and provide data-driven insights to improve educational outcomes. However, its deployment also raises important questions and challenges. It is crucial to address concerns related to privacy, bias, transparency, disinformation, and the impact on human agency and social dynamics within educational settings. Together, we will explore how AI can be designed, implemented, and governed in a way that prioritizes human relationships and connection in education. By considering the ethical and social implications, as well as the affordances, we aim to shape a future where generative AI tools are used to empower learners, support educators, foster inclusivity, and promote a holistic approach to education. -
Teaching Climate Change Across Disciplines
In a follow-on to HILT's 2021 Conference, Harvard faculty from STEM and non-STEM disciplines will share how their students learn about climate change through various lenses. James H. Stock, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability and the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, will provide an overview of climate education at Harvard and serve as moderator of this discussion. -
Centering student need in gateway courses to the field
Dr. Carmen Messerlian, Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology, remodeled the department’s gateway Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology I course after her first year teaching it. Drawing on key observations and 6-8 hours of one-on-one student meetings per week, “I wanted to understand students’ learning needs and requirements, their goals for the course, and where their training was going to take them.” From there, she synthesized both her own experience in the field and quantitative student review data to radically revise the course’s structure. Now the course helps students develop their scientific research skills, explicitly scaffolding how to perform activities that students rarely get formal training in, like academic journal peer reviews, abstract writing, and poster presentations. At its core, the course trains students “how to become a reproductive epidemiologist,” and to learn how to put on “an epidemiological lens” when they produce, digest, or evaluate material in the field. -
“I Learn Best When” | Centering Student Voices
A panel of students from various Harvard Schools will share their experiences as learners. Through the lens of inclusivity and equity, what approaches have they seen work well? What advice do they have for when models or structures don't work so well? The panel will be co-moderated by Sherri Charleston, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (ODIB), and Alta Mauro, Associate Dean of Students for Inclusion and Belonging (Harvard College). All Harvard students are welcome to join the conversation. All Harvard faculty and staff are welcome to attend, learn from our students, and ask questions. -
Next Gen Success = Harvard Success: Inclusive Practices for Supporting First-Gen, Lower-Income Students In and Beyond the Classroom
Join members of the Harvard Next Gen Initiative to learn more about their Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund pilot program that consolidates, aligns, and enhances Harvard’s institutional supports for Next Gen student populations (predominantly first-gen, low-income students) in and beyond the classroom. This session presents an overview of the Next Gen student population, pedagogical tools that promote Next Gen Student Success, and how each one of us plays a role in strengthening Harvard’s commitment to inclusive excellence. -
Learning Design Affinity Group
The HILT Affinity Group for Learning Design is holding an inaugural event on May 16, 2017 in Cabot Library. -
Instructional Moves
IM spotlights reflective instructors from across the university using high-leverage teaching strategies applicable to multiple settings and grounded in teaching and learning research. Moves are anchored in videos that combine class footage with reflections from instructors and students, and these videos are supplemented by relevant research on the move’s efficacy, tips for enacting this move in diverse settings, and related resources that facilitate deeper exploration. -
Usable Knowledge
A digital publication based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education produced for educators everywhere. Usable Knowledge was founded to connect research to practice. They make education research and well-vetted strategies accessible to a wide audience: teachers and principals, district leaders, policymakers, university faculty and higher ed professionals, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, members of the media, and parents. -
Teaching Students How to Learn
Awardees will develop an interdisciplinary STEM initiative that will enable instructors to incorporate explicit lessons to teach their students how to study and learn both inside and outside of the classroom. -
Using a student cohort to test and innovate new training materials
Tyler Giannini and Susan Farbstein, Clinical Professors of Law, pull back the curtain on pedagogy for students in the seminar Advanced Skills Training in Strategic Human Rights Advocacy by making them part of a learning community and giving them ownership over the learning process. For example, each year students work to improve simulations in which they originally were participants, in an earlier prerequisite seminar attached to the International Human Rights Clinic. -
Data Science and Applied Statistics Education Workshop
Friday, January 25th | 10:00am—3:00pm in CGIS Belfer Case Study Room. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, this event will focus on data science and applied statistics and bring together a select set of faculty, student teaching fellows, and staff to: Illuminate how these domains are taught and learned in various ways across Harvard; Demonstrate tools recently developed to support that pedagogical work; Share results of cross-University curriculum mapping efforts in these domains; Meet colleagues from other departments and schools who are teaching similar content -
Designing Your Course
Course design resources from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, including 1) Backward Design, 2) Functions of the Syllabus, 3) Formative ("low-stakes") vs. Summative ("high-stakes") Assessments, 4) Assignment Modalities, 5) Framing and Sequencing Assignments, and 6) Grading and Responding to Student Work. -
The Science of Learning
Key concepts in learning sciences from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, including 1) How Memory Works, 2) Comprehending and Communicating Knowledge, 3) Metacognition and Motivation, and 4) Promoting Engagement. -
Defining learning objectives: Pre-semester, all semester
José A. (Tony) Gómez-Ibáñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, who holds appointments at the GSD and HKS, defines the learning objectives of his course prior to the start of the semester and references them to frame each individual class session: “I use the first five minutes to place each class in the course – ‘The last class we talked about X and today we want to see how those ideas might apply to Y.’” -
Communicating course culture: Building on the syllabus
Karen Brennan, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, designs her syllabus for T550: Designing for Learning by Creating to not only communicate the plan for the course, but to introduce students to the course culture. -
Teaching Decision-Making through Experiential Learning and Personalized Practice Across Disciplines
Awardees will study how decision-making is taught and assessed across disciplines and disseminate effective teaching methods. -
AskUp: Improving learning and metacognition through learner-generated questions
Awardees will continue development of AskUp, a free, open-source studying and learning app that leverages evidence-based techniques to enhance learning, and will evaluate the efficacy of the application’s improvement to metacognition, self-directed learning, and class performance through small randomized trials. -
Assessing learning outcomes from a novel formative assessment in a large enrollment graduate life science course
Awardees will evaluate whether delivering a chalk talk in response to an open-ended experimental design question is an effective method to drive improvements in the general practice and articulation of experimental design, as measured through responses to subsequent written experimental design questions. -
Teaching genomics across Harvard schools
Awardees will establish the “Harvard Genomics Teaching Group,” share pedagogical approaches, a dedicated platform for analysis, and document best practices. -
Badging education: Individualization, collaboration and innovation at the leading edge
Awardees plan to develop a social media and badging platform that allows students to share and collaboratively develop their core knowledge and competencies.
