-
VPAL’s Canvas Dashboards – Lessons Learned
Zac Wang, HILT’s Senior Manager for Resources Adoption and Impact in VPAL, will discuss Canvas Dashboards-Lessons Learned, and later we will try to identify some of our community needs for Zac to bring back to VPAL. -
2021 HILT Conference
The 2021 annual HILT Conference will explore how we teach students to become global agents of change. Our plenary session will consider how our collective experiences in remote teaching and learning allowed us to rethink our models of instruction, community building, and curriculum. Breakout sessions will explore the various ways instructors can equip students to confront ongoing world-wide challenges through active learning, collaborative groups, and engaged scholarship. -
Designing and Teaching a Hybrid Course
The hybrid classroom took teaching and learning world by storm as colleges and universities grappled with balancing online teaching, in-person learning, and public health considerations. With the hybrid model at the forefront of many schools' plans for return to campus in the upcoming academic year, one question looms large: how do we design and teach our courses for a hybrid classroom? How do we teach so that in-person, online, and asynchronous students all feel engaged? What lessons can we take away from this model as we return to fully on-campus teaching? In this HILT Learning Design Affinity Group Lunch & Learn event, faculty and learning designers who have worked or taught in the hybrid model space at Harvard Extension School and Harvard Kennedy School will share their best practices and takeaways. -
Canvas APIs, LTIs, Data and more!
We are excited to welcome Gabe Abrams, Senior Software Engineer at DCE who will discuss Canvas APIs, LTIs, Data and more! Following his 20 minute presentation, we will have 10 minutes for Q&A, 10 minutes for networking in breakout rooms, followed by a wrap-up and any announcements. -
Learning Analytics Reboot
Please join us on May 19th, 12-1 PM EDT for ‘Learning Analytics Reboot’. This will be a chance to hear what others are doing (or wondering about) with respect to learning analytics at Harvard, and of course networking! In preparation for this meeting we encourage you to read the latest EDUCAUSE 2021 Teaching and Learning Horizons Report. -
Demonstrating that everyone’s voice is valued
Dr. Monik Jimenez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, uses different pedagogical approaches to elevate diverse voices and styles of learning. In her Mass Incarceration & Health in the US course, she balances speaking time between a traditional scholar and an impacted community member, and emphasizes to the latter (and to students) that they are an expert. Dr. Jimenez also provides a variety of ways for students to participate and ask questions that include different cultural and neurodivergent learning styles. “It’s important to think about decolonizing the classroom in a layered way,” she reflects. “What are the multiple ways in which systems of power and white supremacy have impacted what we consider to be an ‘optimal’ student through the metrics we’ve been taught?” -
Centering student need in gateway courses to the field
Dr. Carmen Messerlian, Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology, remodeled the department’s gateway Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology I course after her first year teaching it. Drawing on key observations and 6-8 hours of one-on-one student meetings per week, “I wanted to understand students’ learning needs and requirements, their goals for the course, and where their training was going to take them.” From there, she synthesized both her own experience in the field and quantitative student review data to radically revise the course’s structure. Now the course helps students develop their scientific research skills, explicitly scaffolding how to perform activities that students rarely get formal training in, like academic journal peer reviews, abstract writing, and poster presentations. At its core, the course trains students “how to become a reproductive epidemiologist,” and to learn how to put on “an epidemiological lens” when they produce, digest, or evaluate material in the field. -
“I Learn Best When” | Centering Student Voices
A panel of students from various Harvard Schools will share their experiences as learners. Through the lens of inclusivity and equity, what approaches have they seen work well? What advice do they have for when models or structures don't work so well? The panel will be co-moderated by Sherri Charleston, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (ODIB), and Alta Mauro, Associate Dean of Students for Inclusion and Belonging (Harvard College). All Harvard students are welcome to join the conversation. All Harvard faculty and staff are welcome to attend, learn from our students, and ask questions. -
Capturing conversation to build ideas collectively
Ryan Buell, Finnegan Family Associate Professor of Business Administration, leveraged Scribble for his remote course to help students engage with case discussion longitudinally and collectively. The virtual board platform allowed students to engage online in lieu of an in-person experience in which the blackboard operates as a coordinating element for case discussion. “It helps students put the pieces together, allowing them to track any idea shared by the faculty and shared by the students.” -
Student Success Initiatives
Please join the HILT Learning Design affinity group on April 28th at 12PM ET for a webinar on recent student success initiatives featuring colleagues from across the Harvard University community. Each of the panel’s presenters will share experiences from the past year related to work supporting their respective learner audiences, along with the challenges and future opportunities this unexpected and prolonged disruption has presented.
