Into Practice, a biweekly communication distributed from the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning to active instructors during the academic year was inspired by a successful 2012 HILT grant project. The e-letter highlights the pedagogical practices of individual faculty members from across Schools and delivers timely, evidence-based teaching advice, contributing to and strengthening a University-wide community of practice around teaching.

Below is a catalog of all the Into Practice issues sorted by the publication date. To subscribe to Into Practice, please sign-up via our Mailing List page.

• The hiccups, humility, and benefits of deciding to flip a course

  Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, flipped part of her course, CS161, “Operating Systems."

• SLab 2.0

  With Advance Grant funding, Rehding established regular lab meetings to refine the goals of SLab 2.0, updated equipment in the lab to accommodate the increased usage of the space, designed a website to host a repository of digital projects and to highlight current student projects, and hosted masterclasses open to the Harvard community.

• 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.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases for online platforms: scaling up an e-learning module development project to expand reach across Harvard and to public health professionals in field settings

  Awardees will extend the transformation of traditional to online cases across Harvard by developing a new e-module for delivering teaching cases on-line to public health professionals in field settings, and convening a cross-Harvard workshop to share best practices.

• Choice architecture: When students become designers of optimal decision processes

  Awardee will develop in-class and online activities to improve student decision-making and increase classroom engagement.

• New methods for hands-on teaching in the history of technology

  Awardee developed experiential learning opportunities for students in history of technology courses, including in-class demonstration and simulation.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases in public health for online platforms: an e-learning module development project

  Awardees transformed STRIPED teaching cases for online delivery, consistent with digital learning research and toward expanded outreach to working professionals.

• Bridging education research and practice using online learning modules

  Awardees will explore the best-performing sequences of instructional materials in both controlled studies and in the context of real online courses.

• New educational opportunities at Harvard through online behavioral research

  Ken Nakayama (psychology), Krzysztof Gajos (computer science), and Ryan Enos (government) will create web-based modules for a variety of classroom contexts that can be utilized flexibly by students and instructors to actively participate in behavioral research.

• A Crash course in Harvard College and undergraduates

  Awardees designed a workshop for teaching fellows to increase understanding of teaching Harvard undergraduates in order to foster meaningful and productive relationships.