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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.

  • Interdisciplinary learning through accessible, intentional technology

    Hong Qu, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, taught Data Visualization virtually last spring to over 70 students from different Harvard Schools, levels of experience, and corners of the world. To foster a close-knit community among students from diverse backgrounds, Qu intentionally curated a set of online tools and learning exercises to generate an “ambient telepresence.” For instance, he assigned group data visualization projects to promote peer learning and used VoiceThread for assigned peer critiques. During synchronous class time, students were invited to sketch with Qu using Jamboard on the shared screen—a novel form of participation to draw out the inner artist/designer in every student. “I wanted to give them a sense that we’re spending time with each other in this very challenging period to learn as a community, to work together on group projects, and to achieve organic connections and authentic relationships between all our unique places during this pandemic.”

  • Engaging with course material and serving communities at the same time

    Linda Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, created the Harvard Kennedy School’s first-ever field lab, which combines in-class learning with real-world project work in local and state governments. Since its inception in 2005, the course has involved hundreds of students from across Harvard graduate schools. It is an advanced course focused on public finance, operations and budgeting. Each year, Bilmes and her teaching team receive dozens of applications from mayors and city managers. She and her team select a small number of intellectually challenging projects with buy-in at the highest level. The selected partners describe their projects to students at the start of the term; projects range from addressing homelessness to municipal debt. Then students go on site visits to “get a sense of the crunchiness” of each task and to rank clients by interest before they are sorted into collaborative teams. At the end of the semester, students present recommendations to clients.

  • Engaging students in a field-based, problem-oriented, experiential course

    Jorrit de Jong, Lecturer in Public Policy, combines practice, research, and engagement with learning and teaching in his course Innovation Lab: Public Problem Solving in Massachusetts Cities, in which students participate in a field-based, problem-oriented, and experiential setting, immersed in local city governments. Students observe, first-hand, the work of public servants—going on inspection tours, triaging cases, analyzing geo-spatial data, reconciling competing priorities and politics—and then pitch proposals to city mayors, usually building on the work of previous students.

  • Hackademic

    Hackademic Awardees: Sajeev Popat (HKS) and Ian Davenport (GSAS) Summary: Hackademic is a software platform that helps PhD students in academia prepare for and start full-time data science careers in industry.  We’re developing a sell guided training platform that takes academics from research to industry without internships, bootcamps, or MOOCs.

  • Humaine

    Humaine is an online conversational AI platform that provides virtual patients for the deliberate practice of medical students and trainees.

  • 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.

  • tPock – Digital High School Education in Bangladesh

    Tpock's goal is to digitalize high school education in Bangladesh to improve the quality of education in the country.

  • Mopi

    Mopi fills this gap by empowering women entrepreneurs with pedagogical and managerial training and resources to run their own childcare centers.

  • Hustl

    Hustl Awardees: Mohini Bishnoi (HKS) and Sachin Paranjape (External) Summary coming soon 

  • 1Room

    We plan to partner with local educators to build projects that help drive learning outcomes and engage students in learning.

  • GenUnity

    GenUnity is a civic leadership experience that empowers individuals to affect real, systemic change in their community.

  • Engaging Education for Everyone

    Our project hopes to create a software that allows Chinese students to learn academic concepts through rewarding interactions with animated instructions.

  • Thrively Health

    At Thrively Health, our mission is to democratize health by empowering women in making better care decisions for themselves and their family.

  • ACE: Accelerating Civic Engagement

    ACE seeks to reignite civic engagement nationally by empowering individuals to learn about, participate in, and lead their local communities.

  • Enriching learning through student-led provocation

    Though Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Lecturer on History and Literature, Public Policy, and Education, plays an integral role in class discussions for his course Stories of Slavery and Freedom, students are responsible for leading the majority of classes through an exercise McCarthy refers to as “provocation.” “The provokers do not come in and give a summary of what we’ve read or a mini-lecture about the top-line themes that might emerge from the assigned readings. I really want them to find some way to literally provoke us into conversation, get the juices flowing, and try to get all the students to think about something urgently at the outset of class.”

  • Our Voices Matter

     The purpose of this project is to teach public speaking and advocacy skills to low-income middle school students of color.

  • Using faculty videos in required courses to engage students at all levels

    Like many instructors of required courses, Pinar Dogan, Lecturer in Public Policy and SLATE Faculty Liaison for Pedagogy, teaches her section of Markets and Market Failure to students with significantly divergent levels of prior knowledge of microeconomics. Seeking a way for students “to end up at the same place even though they started at very different places,” Dogan partnered with SLATE to develop videos of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) faculty experts explaining the relevance of math-intensive or potentially dry concepts (e.g., fixed costs or price elasticity) to public policy. 
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