I saw that Eric Mazur – the author of Peer Instruction – was holding a workshop on how to teach online. I couldn’t pass that up. I attended the workshop and I am very happy I did. I felt that the presentation was broken into three parts: a traditional talk about his general strategy of how to teach, how he uses Perusall in his classes, and how he does synchronous online learning.

General Strategy

Mazur states that the traditional classroom consists of instructor-paced
synchronous lecture for information transfer and sense making is done at home in self-paced asynchronous way. The flipped class model flips these so that sense making is done in class. This is kind of thing that you would normally hear in an Eric Mazur talk – I have been to a number of his lectures.

He is concerned that in an online environment students are asked to learn asynchronously alone for both information transfer and sense making. The key term there is “alone”. It is his hope to make both of this functions interactive powerful learning experiences.

Perusall

Imagine reading with a highlighter than can talk back to you? Perusall is a neat tool. It looks like and feels like one of the content management systems (e.g., Moodle) that you would use for class. You can upload content for students to read and interact with. The major difference is that you can place students in reading groups (of about 20 students) and have them highlight passages and have a sort of visual discussion thread on whatever questions that arise.

Mazur argues that this gets students to read the text and allows them to learn at their own pace and has evidence to back it up. I have been thinking a lot about how students read lately; this is a novel solution. There is also this cool grading feature that allows you automatically grade students involvement with the App – this way you can check up on whether the students are actually doing the work (Sounds like a tool a dean might want to use to see if faculty actually read meeting notes, sorry DELETE HAHA).

There is always a catch-22; Mazur is on the team that created the software. So how much is advertising his own product? It’s free. Still it seems like a great product. I will definitely try it this summer.

I was in fact going to do something Mazur like for the information transfer part of my class this summer. I was going to have short videos with multiple choice questions and have that be the starting point for office hour discussion. But of course this is having students do almost all the work alone versus working interactively. Very interesting!

Learning in a Team

Mazur’s approach to the faculty-lead discussion seems very similar to what he has already championed in the past: Get students learning from one another. He uses the following flow chart for how he runs his classes:

He uses the breakout rooms in Zoom to get the students working in groups and has them check in. This is wonderful and very similar to what I have already implemented in my classes.

Darn Harvard!!

If you follow this blog you know that I sometimes get whinny how the oversize impact that the elite schools have in influencing American higher education. During my one semester teaching a single discussion section at Harvard a few years ago, I remember being shown data that said Harvard students were exceptional readers. I imagine that Perusall would be in a political science class and at Harvard. I wonder how physics majors at a regular university would use the software. Mazur did comment that this had been tested at other universities, it might be worth diving into the literature on this one. I really like that it almost forces students to read. I have to wonder if there isn’t a better tool out there being envisioned in someone’s mind. Something between Perusall and say IVV???

I wonder if they have considered giving a Nobel Prize for physics education? Boy, Mazur would have to be near the top of the list?

The copy of his slides can be found here and the presentation can be found this link.