Forging the New Frontier of Teaching and Learning

At HarvardX, Rob developed an experimental online program called HarvardX for Alumni, a lifelong learning resource for Harvard graduates, taught by celebrated faculty on topics ranging from neuroscience and Chinese history to poetry and physics.

Undeniably, Rob is an innovative educator — this makes it all the more fitting that he has been the Faculty Director of Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning since 2013.

We caught up with Rob in October 2017 and asked him how teaching is changing, and why engagement in college classrooms is more important to teaching and learning than ever before. (Interview posted: November 16, 2017)

PIL: When you were interviewed as the newly appointed faculty director of the Bok Center, you said you had “never seen this level of broad-based interest in creatively rethinking teaching and learning among both faculty and students.” What has been the single largest driver of this change to pedagogy? How is this shift in thinking changing how educators teach and students learn on campuses everywhere?

Rob: At the national level, one of the major drivers for changes in pedagogy has been the long-overdue emergence of online learning — both as a possible solution to the problems we educators all face in terms of cost and scalability, and as something that can be creatively integrated with what we do with students on campus. For the first time, many instructors are taking seriously the possibility that you can use online tools and approaches like the flipped classroom to really change what the learning experience might look like for students and how effective that experience can be. 

This interest in changing the learning experience has also been driven by an ever-growing mountain of evidence from educational research indicating that the traditional ways in which we teach are really not as effective as we once thought. Thus, at a moment when education is under great pressure to scale and to deliver results, educators have been driven to look for more creative and demonstrably effective ways to teach. 

Meanwhile, at the institutional level, there has been increased dialogue at places like Harvard about the importance of teaching and the integration of teaching and scholarship as part and parcel of being an academic. We have had very strong messaging about this from the leadership of the university, all the way from the president to deans to department chairs to faculty. Our leadership has been spending both political and financial capital on the importance of teaching, and this has really helped drive change here at Harvard.

PIL: What is activity-based learning? Tell us about the mystery of a “watery Kool-Aid” blood sample used in your cell biology course to introduce the unit on cancer. What evidence are you seeing that activity-based learning leads to better learning?

Rob: Activity-based learning describes a rich range of ways in which students engage with content in the classroom that go beyond just listening and watching. I would say that higher-order cognitive gains are achieved when you can take a concept, understand it fully in terms of the way it was presented to you, and then apply it creatively to something quite different. So, in activity-based learning, instead of simply listening and absorbing ideas that are presented verbally, students are able to listen and then try to apply those ideas in a different context. This is done through a series of group-based or individual classroom activities that enable students to construct their own understanding of something by applying what they’ve heard. Furthermore, we’ve seen that part and parcel of developing this ability is providing the right motivation. Instead of simply obeying instructions like “let’s apply A to B,” B is made compelling, surprising, or intriguing, and then there’s a much greater chance that there will be full engagement with the activity in the classroom. 

The “watery blood sample” example from my class demonstrates how we can use the mystery of medical diagnosis to give students a vivid and compelling experience of what it is to see something puzzling, then take what you’ve learned about biology and apply it to that puzzle with possible life-saving consequences. Basically, when blood seems watery, it can be a sign that it is leukemic, so there’s a much lower concentration of red blood cells. The activity thus asks students to take what they know about blood and red blood cells, and what they know about how that relates to disease, and bring it all together in the context of an observation, and how their interpretation of what they observed actually means for the health of the patient. This is an example of an activity that’s driven by something intriguing and something highly motivating. In some ways, you can think of this as a combination of activity-based learning with gamification, where the outcome of the game could save a life. 

What is the evidence this works? Well, we have seen in our classrooms that students’ ability to apply concepts in new settings is improved by activity-based learning. Students’ performance on assessments, especially on so-called interval assessments, is enhanced by these kinds of activities in the classroom. And there’s a very deep bench of literature, composed of literally hundreds of research articles, that shows that active learning in the classroom drives both performance, retention, and the motivation to learn more.

PIL: Does large class size preclude the use of activity-based learning? What has current research discovered about the effectiveness of peer instruction (PI) for courses of different sizes? What differences do you see between revamping a traditional STEM lecture and a humanities lecture? What lessons have you learned from your experiences with MOOCs about the role of the classroom and peer-learners, whether physical or virtual? Have you experienced much pushback from faculty or students on the use of student response systems (i.e. clickers) or other innovative teaching methods? 

Rob: I’ve seen activity-based learning used in classes as small as 15 to classes as large as 700 students. With activity-based learning, there are a series of approaches that can be done both individually as well as in small groups. Even in a class of several hundred students seated in a steeply tiered lecture hall, opportunities to work on something together can involve turning to your neighbor for a peer-to-peer conversation, or forming a group of four across a couple of rows — I’ve done this many a time. What I’ve found is that the problem is not the size of the class, but rather establishing clear expectations early on that this kind of learning activity will happen regularly and consistently. If you only do four active learning activities in a semester, the students never get accustomed to it, the process remains awkward, and there’s a learning curve every single time you do it — but if you do active learning activities in every class session, the students become very accustomed to them and the activities flow easily. Even in a very large class, students can adapt to rearranging themselves and engaging in a paired or group activity very quickly once they get into the rhythm of doing it. Active learning, like anything else, is facilitated by practice and familiarity; if you set up a course to develop that familiarity, the size of the class will no longer be a problem.

At the core of activity-based learning is this ability to discuss an idea together or tackle a problem together, which is very motivating for students. A feeling of isolation, be it in a MOOC or a large lecture hall, can be really deadly. Students often fall into an isolated situation where they are struggling with a problem alone, and get stuck in a counterproductive loop. What they need is to share the problem with another student, be challenged by them and in turn challenge them. That process of dialogue can happen both online and in person, and in both settings, I think it is incredibly important.

Because active learning is focused on recontextualization, opinion, and the application and synthesis of what you know, teaching in both STEM and the humanities will have largely similar approaches, particularly because what activity-based learning is departing from is very much the same. Traditionally, both STEM and humanities lectures have focused on the delivery of content, particularly in the context of large lecture courses. So, even though the topics, manipulations, and mechanics in STEM and the humanities may differ — some more quantitative and numerical, others more qualitative — I don’t actually see a difference for the two disciplines when it comes to revamping traditional lectures to include more activity-based learning. 

To be honest, I don’t actually view clickers as being particularly innovative at this point. Originally, the functionality was just multiple choice using physical clicker tools. Clickers have now moved fully online, and allow for polling, free response, word clouds, ranking and voting up and down various ideas — in fact, this suite of polling-related modes of engagement is the truly innovative expression of what clickers started years ago. When clicker technology was just coming out, I didn’t really see much pushback; in fact, faculty were really interested in them. If they understand a technology and have the support to implement it, faculty will do so. As for students, it goes back to my earlier comment — if you set expectations early on and do something repeatedly, students are perfectly fine with innovation and tend to embrace it. 

PIL: In our 2010 study on assignment handouts, we analyzed 191 research handouts from 28 U.S. colleges and universities and found that 83 percent of the assignments asked students to write a standard research paper. Few handouts asked students to present findings using other formats, including multimedia and oral presentations. Has assignment design changed much since then? As far as using technology with teaching and learning, how have you used visualization mapping and animations in your introductory Life and Sciences courses to make eBook diagrams come to life? How do assignments like these benefit student learning as well as an instructor’s ability to evaluate student learning?

Rob: I think it’s clear that scientific writing — the ability to write a paper or a lab report or a research paper-style writing assignment of any kind — has always been important. However, we have realized that we still have much to improve in terms of training students on the types of accurate storytelling necessary for strong scientific writing. Much effort has been made in the last decade to create focused guidance for how to write with the appropriate language and at the appropriate level for a scientific audience. 

Over the last decade, I’ve seen a real shift in how media is used in the communication of science, not just at the undergraduate but at the graduate student level. The importance of being able to communicate to a non-expert audience has really gained traction. At Harvard, we now have a project called Harvard Horizons that specifically trains graduate students in how to communicate their research to a non-expert audience and we have seen enormous interest from grad students in learning this particular skill set. Dramatic improvements have been made in developing writing assignments for undergraduates where the students write for a non-expert public audience. Students so often become bogged down in details that being able to step back, see the forest as well as the trees, and communicate science in a clear, compelling way is incredibly important. We’ve been doing that not just in writing, but also in speaking, and we’ve combined speaking with multimedia, giving students the opportunity to be recorded, or to intersperse their presentations with stop-motion animation, diagrams that help explain concepts, and other tools. We’ve seen that the depth of understanding of any given concept is really enhanced by this multimedia approach targeted at addressing a more public, non-expert audience. 

The use of animation as a new modality of assignment type has had particularly interesting challenges. What often happens is that training in the software tool — be it Maya or LightWave or any of the animation programs — overwhelms the content; students get too caught up in learning to use the tool, and you don’t have enough time to get to the content and to telling the visual story. For this reason, stop-motion animation is very effective because there are wonderful apps available for phones and tablets. Depending on the affordances of the course, we’ve also found that it can be very productive to have the students merely storyboard their animations. That process of storyboarding  allows them to have the experience of visualization without having to actually master the tool to create the animation. In addition, you then have the possibility of offering those storyboards to other students to work with as part of a collaborative effort, perhaps as part of a dedicated animation course.

PIL: Some educators say activity-based learning is the “death knell” for the lecturer. Is there still a place for the charismatic lecture/performance in academia? Ultimately, how will the dimensions of teaching and learning continue to change to fit the challenges of the 21st century?

Rob: ​​I would say that every form of active learning includes context-setting, clarifying of perspective, as well as leading students through some kind of a discussion-engagement format, and all of those things require compelling public speaking. So, to say that lecturing is dead is inaccurate. Lecturing, and that form of projected public speaking, is now interspersed with a variety of other kinds of activities, so in my view, it’s not “either” — it’s “and” — you both lecture and do active learning. 

What we’ve seen time and time again is that learners value the compelling, motivating context-setting that a really good speaker provides. To say that activity-based learning has been the death knell of the lecture is not true; it has instead transformed how we lecture, communicate, and engage. We still need to stand up in front of a group and talk to them in a way that’s motivating. That kind of oratory motivation remains very important in the learning process.

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Rob Lue is the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, the Faculty Director of HarvardX, the Faculty Director of the Harvard Ed Portal, and a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Rob’s research focuses on understanding how large research universities can promote the development of future scientists and of science-literate citizens.

For a decade, Rob served as the director of Life Sciences Education at Harvard, where he led a complete redesign of the introductory curriculum that created some of the largest science courses on campus. He also teaches one of the most popular courses at Harvard: LIFESCI 1a. An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology.

Rob, who is part Romanian and part Chinese, grew up in Jamaica. He is a graduate of St. George’s College in Kingston, Jamaica, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and completed a Ph.D. at Harvard in molecular and cellular biology in 1995.

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of higher education, teaching, and lifelong learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL).
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PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find and use information for courses and for use in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.

“Rob Lue: Forging the New Frontier of Teaching and Learning” (email interview) by Alison Head and Michele Van Hoeck, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 28 (16 November 2017) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.