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  • Custom Course Bots & Learning Analytics

    Join The Learning Data & Analytics Affinity Group for their next online event: Custom Course Bots & Learning Analytics Tuesday, April 30, 12:00pm – 1:00pm Online Zoom event: Register here! Many courses are beginning to offer custom genAI bots in the course site. We’ll convene for an open discussion guided by these questions: (a) When […]

  • Spring 2024 Harvard i-lab & HILT Faculty Seminar

    Spring 2024 Harvard i-lab & HILT Faculty Seminar: Project-based Learning / Learning-by-doing   The Harvard Innovation Labs (i-Labs) and the Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching (HILT) would like to invite all Harvard faculty to a seminar on Wednesday, April 10th from 3-4:30 pm at the i-Labs. Our goal is to convene instructors from across […]

  • 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.

  • Using the classroom to challenge the boundaries of a discipline

    Sawako Kaijima, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, challenges students’ preconceptions towards material often defined by their disciplinary norms though the use of visual programing to foster an “intuitive understanding of structural engineering in architectural design.” Structural design and architectural design often live separately in teaching and practice but are fundamentally linked. So her Interface Design: Integrating Material Perceptions course seeks to fuse these two disciplines. The use of a software tool developed specifically for this course, which is accessible even to students with no programming experience, “defamiliarizes architecture students from the common way of looking at materials” and introduces them to an engineering perspective right from the start.

  • Mosaic

    Mosaic Awardees: Erick Diaz (GSD), Sascha Pellerin (HGSE), and Joshua Baltodano (HKS) Summary: Mosaic supports first-generation college students applying to graduate school through a comprehensive and individualized coaching model. Our coaches, who are first-gen themselves, walk applicants through the key aspects of an application (e.g., resumes, personal statements, and selecting recommendors) and provide detailed feedback […]

  • Lowering the barriers to becoming a practitioner

    Lily Song, Lecturer and Research Associate, divides her course, Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice, into three sections. In “Unraveling,” students read theoretical texts about community development and interrogate dominant approaches that uphold race, class, and gender-based supremacies. “Revisiting” immerses students in alternative histories of community development, drawing on various liberation struggles and movements. Finally, “praxis” brings community development practitioners to present and discuss their work. The course seeks to create a peer-learning community that pushes past remedial and reformist approaches to community development in order to intervene on prevailing economic, political, social, and spatial structures and processes that lock communities in denigrating and dehumanizing terms. By showcasing and interrogating work being done in the field, it breaks down students’ barriers to entry.

  • Syllabus Explorer

    Harvard Syllabus Explorer is a web application developed by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning - Research Group. Syllabus Explorer combines registrarial data and syllabi from Canvas to give users the ability to search for and download syllabi across Harvard.

  • Pushing students to confront limits by transforming the abstract to physical form

    In her Transformations course, Assistant Professor of Architecture Megan Panzano uses architectural design methods and concepts, and a workshop approach for giving feedback, to engage undergraduates from a wide range of concentrations. When students translate abstract ideas into physical form through a variety of materials and fabrication techniques (see photos below), they confront limits, question assumptions, and expand their problem-solving capacity.

  • Meet

    Meet is a crowdsourced platform for job-seekers to share and access trusted and relevant information about employers in their local area.

  • Giving students practice with constructive criticism

    Mark Mulligan, Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture, requires students in Tectonics Lab to work collaboratively on design-build projects of increasing complexity over the course of the semester that are subject to critique by peers, guest experts, and Mulligan himself.

  • ‘Real-world’ projects: Balancing student learning and community need

    Ann Forsyth, Professor of Urban Planning, incorporates projects with clients into many of her Graduate School of Design courses, from semester-long endeavors to optional assignments.

  • 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.’”

  • “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

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

  • Understanding how hackathon methodology drives participatory design pedagogy

    Awardees will explore the “hackathon” as a participatory learning and engagement strategy to bring together members of the Harvard community and beyond.

  • 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.

  • Teaching creativity: Landscape, architecture, originality, and autobiography

    Awardee will develop a new interdisciplinary course, involving leaders in landscape architecture and other fields paired with faculty at Harvard to examine originality, authenticity, and invention, and develop a model for courses that spark students to develop their own creative voice.

  • Innovative studio space

    Awardees plan to design and teach a studio class in a technology-enhanced, active-learning classroom.

  • Spain GSD

    Spain GSD is a student group based at the GSD, who aims to promote the work of Spanish scholars, architects, planners, and institutions, within the Harvard Community and beyond. The group organizes lectures by Spanish emergent and consolidated architects and scholars, site visits to Spanish-designed architecture in the area, and social gatherings in order to give visibility and bring to forth the challenges and successes of the country in the architecture and planning fields, but also in the social and economical arena addressing contemporary debates. The group also functions as a platform for new discourses and possibilities within the Spanish context to be heard by a diverse international community. The objective is to create an enriching dialogue and exchange, that could lead to innovation and a better understanding of the Spanish culture in North America.

  • Discovery YA

    DISCOVERY YA is a student-run organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design whose goals are to expand awareness and interest in design by offering introductory workshops and lessons in design to Boston Area youth. The program strives to foster the development of a broad range of design skills and to put students on track for exploring their creative ideas at the collegiate level. The goal of the program is to cultivate greater diversity in the next generation of designers in order to expand the scope and influence of the profession itself.

  • Open Letters

    Open Letters is a bi-weekly experimental literary journal whose fundamental purpose is to stimulate earnest, personal and thoughtful conversation about architecture through the publication of first-person correspondence. Each print issue will present one open letter (i.e. addressed to a particular party, but intended for publication)—or a response to a previous issue—that focuses on a specific topic related to the built environment. OL editorial staff will accept submissions from GSD students, faculty and staff, but also from correspondents outside the Design School. We enthusiastically encourage liberal interpretations of the submission framework and welcome a variety of media—so long as it can be placed in a No. 10 envelope.
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