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.

• Learning from learning management systems: New ways to engage students through Canvas

  Arthur Applbaum, Adams Professor of Democratic Values, Quinton Mayne, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, and Christopher Robichaud, Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy piloted the new University-wide learning management system, Canvas, in their spring 2015 courses at the Harvard Kennedy School.

• Elevating class conversation: Taking a case-based approach

  Nancy Kane, Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Case-based Teaching and Learning at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, trains instructors on using the teaching case to lead effective course discussions.

• Devices in the classroom? Things to consider

  Alison Simmons, Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy, made a decision in 2012 to include a policy in all her syllabi stating that electronic devices be put away during class time.

• 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.

• 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."

• Hedera: A personalized vocabulary database and readability gauge

  Hedera facilitates the application of second language acquisition research to teaching and learning by enabling users to maintain custom lists of known vocabulary and analyzing texts to see what percentage of words the user knows.

• Making “Inclass” into a campus-wide educational technology app store

  Awardee will scale the availability of the SEAS educational technology (edtech) app store across the University.

• How digital education transforms residential teaching: Systematic analysis of faculty attitudes and experiences creating MOOCs

  Awardees will synthesize instructors’ pedagogically relevant experiences and lessons learned making Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and create a set of best practices.

• “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

  Awardees will offer a series of interdisciplinary workshops that develop critical thinking through making.

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

  Awardees will measure the effects of open-ended extracurricular projects on student learning.