Last September 2009, while still employed at CSU East Bay as their Director of Online and Hybrid Support Center, I had the awesome opportunity to share my teaching innovations through a webinar hosted by the Educause Learning Initiative. The archive of the 60-minute presentation, titled Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture (which soon thereafter became the name of my consulting business), is now public and I invite you to watch and listen and share it with your colleagues.
The presentation is an overview of a semester-long teaching experiment in which I removed all lectures from my community college History of Women in Art class. The passive lecture content was pre-recorded as audio/visual podcasts (or enhanced podcasts) and shared through a link in Blackboard along with an illustrated text-transcript of the lecture; providing students with a choice in how they would access the lecture content. After completing the lectures online, my students engaged in interactive online VoiceThread discussions and learning activities, in which they applied lecture concepts in an effort to begin to reach the unit’s learning objectives. After completing the pre-class assignments, students came to class where we spent all of our time actively engaged in discussion, analysis, and debate about the unit’s content. Randomly, students were also given “active learning assignments,” for example, “Go to the mall and critically observe your visual surroundings. Analyze the actions and signs that contribute to the social enforcement of the “male gaze.” Share your experiences in class and evaluate whether or not our society constructs a passive experience for women, situating them as objects of the male gaze. Is this an extension or break from the effects of western culture’s history of art?”
The shift in my course design and pedagogy was strongly influenced by the research I had done about Millennial students. I wanted to explore the success of this type of learning environment, in an effort to fundamentally question the effectiveness of passive lectures and active classroom time in the construction of critical thinking, visual literacy skills, as well as the success of crafting personalized, relevant learning experiences for 21st century students.
The end of the archive reveals compelling student survey feedback. I hope you enjoy it and learn from it! Please share your thoughts if you take the time to watch!
The ELI website also shares a link to an audio recording of my speaking with three of my students at the end of the semester. Their dynamic voices are still some of the most compelling reasons for shifting our pedagogy and design of IN-CLASS learning experiences, in my opinion.
Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture
Click on “View Archive”
Enjoy!
