CLA does Active Learning and Eric Mazur -- and we learned a lot

Today, we had a full day of talking about active learning and, student engagement.

The morning panels focused on learning spaces and how to teach in our EASL spaces.  Faculty gave some great ideas, and we had a lively discussion centering on group work, evaluation, pitfalls, and triumphs.
The Pearson session discussed Mylabs but also some of the new products Pearson is introducing, in particular Pearson Writer, a program that allows for automated grading and Pearson Revel, a program that connects textbooks more immediately with reinforcing activities.  The automated grading started sparking some interesting discussions in the room and on our backchannel. (We used padlet for our back channel for the folks who did not want to use twitter.)
Our final panel focused on engaging students in an online environment -- great teaching suggestions that can also help in face-to-face or hybrid classes, such as creating lists, for example a play list of musical pieces with explanation why these pieces are still relevant today.

Eric Mazur's talk focused on assessment -- and how we have to rethink assessment if we want to give our students better learning experiences.  We need to move away from grading for the sake of rankings; we need to move away from problems that the students memorize the way to find the solution for rather than exploring how to get to the solution.  We need to create assignments where the answers cannot be found on Google; we need to create projects where students learn knowledge because it leads them to the solution of the project -- projects as Trojan horses.

If you have missed Eric Mazur's talk, here is the Youtube link:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHs8rc6lBqM&feature=youtu.be

And if you are wondering what Mazur is telling students -- http://youtu.be/xkduVtwcr4A -- I am hoping that some of the students will take his words to heart and take ownership of his learning.

Looking forward to CLA does Active Learning and Eric Mazur

Some of you may already know that Eric Mazur is coming to Auburn University on September 19 to talk about active learning.

We have a full plate for that day, especially if you are in our College of Liberal Arts.  In the morning, three panels will discuss active learning and learning spaces, in connection with Pearson, and how to do it online.  Our panelists come from multiple departments across the college.

And at 12:30 we have lunch starting, and Dr. Mazur's talk at 1pm.

If you have not registered for the event -- here is the link -- hurry up because we need to get the head count to the caterers early next week.

http://cla.auburn.edu/activelearning/ provides you with more information and the link to both Eric Mazur and to the registration page.