Tony Crider, Associate Professor of Physics, presents a TED-style talk on experiential education.
Advances in educational technologies are accelerating, allowing educators to more actively engage students both within and beyond the classroom. The recent maturity of online content delivery and assessment has spawned several massive on-line, open courses (MOOCs) and several variations, thereof. If it can be done online, it will be done online. What then, should we do in the classroom? Many teachers propose flipping the classroom; students listen to lectures outside of class and do homework together during class. In this talk, we will examine slightly more creative ways to make use of class time with a focus on three examples of experiential education. The first is the Reacting to the Past game role-playing game series developed for history classes but now used in many disciplines. Next is a series of activities developed for an interdisciplinary, team-taught honors class on SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. These are designed both to have students apply their assigned reading and to experience (as much as possible) the exhilaration and frustration of astronomers doing research in this area. Our third example is the replacement of a final exam with an “epic finale” that has students demonstrate their understanding of a topic rather than merely asking them to silently answer questions about it on a piece of paper.
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