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.
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Using digital resources to augment course materials
Theodore Svoronos, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, developed digital-learning materials as part of the Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) project and now uses them for both residential and online-learning communities. -
Multimedia assignments: A doable skill, a usable skill
Shigehisa (Hisa) Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, prefers brief video assignments – where students create a visual presentation with audio narrative – to regular written response papers. “I think the ability to express oneself with media is one of the most usable skills.” -
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. -
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. -
Development of Student-run Podcasts as an Innovative Learning and Communication Tool
Awardees will develop training workshops to teach students to communicate technical knowledge to broader audiences through podcasting. -
The Video Essay as a Learning Tool in Field Based Courses and Design Courses
Awardees will explore the video essay as an integrative teaching tool in field-based and design-oriented courses. -
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. -
Virtual reality narratives in foreign language pedagogy
Awardees will engage foreign language students in cultural and linguistic immersion through virtual reality (VR) film narratives. -
Revision history analytics in service of analyzing the writing process
Awardees analyzed revision patterns in student writing, how they relate to activities within specific passages of a written text, and how revision-history analytics can play a role in supporting teaching and improvement in writing skills. -
Creating real-time connections in online courses
Awardees evaluated types of interactivity between faculty and students and generated a resource guide of best practices to assist instructors in interacting with online and residential students in Canvas. -
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. -
Extending active classroom activities to online students
Awardees developed methods for online students to participate in active learning exercises designed for the traditional classroom. -
Teaching rewriting
Awardees explored the potential impact of a writing instruction method that emphasizes the editorial and revision process, which has the potential advantages of scalability and skill transferability. -
Getting learners to AskUp: Enhancing education through learner-generated questions
Awardees will develop an online platform – “AskUp” – using evidence-based techniques to facilitate and enhance learning through learner-generated questions. -
The Videographic essay: Innovating a multimedia pedagogical tool for 21st Century scholarship
Awardee will articulate the scholarly development of the use of the “videographic essay” as a method for communicating knowledge, compiling research, and synthesizing arguments, and organize a 2015 special workshop on multimedia methods. -
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. -
From text to multimedia: Evaluating a scalable enhancement model for problem-based learning
Awardees will conduct a comparison study to identify the impact of multimedia enhancements of case materials on student preparation and engagement. -
Study of collaborative writing
Using Virtual Machines to Track Collaborative Writing Assignments -
Integrating consequential simulations in coursework
Innovative Teaching using a Trading Simulation