Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research, first experimented with simulations in the classroom as a doctoral student. She crafted vignettes and scenarios on paper aimed at developing empathy, cross-cultural awareness, and behavioral change and presented them to students. As she continued her research on fostering collaboration between distributed team members from different cultures and with different language abilities, Neeley sought to develop a virtual teaching tool that could simulate these dynamics for students and provide an opportunity to gain insight into the cognitive and emotional challenges that arise for members and managers of global teams. She developed an online Global Collaboration Simulation, The Tip of the Iceberg, in which students are randomly assigned roles of native or non-native English speakers at a fictional organization. In the fifteen-minute simulation, the program constrains students’ actions to mimic communication patterns of real teams and provide firsthand experience of how communication challenges can interfere with work goals. The simulation has been used in courses at Harvard Business School and by thousands of people worldwide since its launch.
Like many instructors of required courses, Pinar Dogan, Lecturer in Public Policy and SLATE Faculty Liaison for Pedagogy, teaches her section of Markets and Market Failure to students with significantly divergent levels of prior knowledge of microeconomics. Seeking a way for students “to end up at the same place even though they started at very different places,” Dogan partnered with SLATE to develop videos of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) faculty experts explaining the relevance of math-intensive or potentially dry concepts (e.g., fixed costs or price elasticity) to public policy.
See Professor Robert Keegan offer a myriad of entry points into material presented throughout his lectures to keep the content fresh while boosting student engagement, in Harvard Graduate School of Education’s...
Elena Kramer, Bussey Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Noel Michele Holbrook, Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry, co-teach General Education course OEB 52: Biology of Plants through lectures, labs, field trips, and weekly quizzes that students use to combine concepts into a creative project at the end of the semester. The prompt, “Trace the rise of the sporophyte,” results in the production of resources like videos, art pieces, fashion magazines, original songs, poems, and children’s books that students present in an arts festival during the final class.
Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, trains students to interpret history through various media including graphics, data visualizations, videos, and art installations.
Canvas’ rich content editor, available in several course site features, enables multimedia uploading, HTML editing, and embedding rich media such as links, files, videos, and images.
The Digital Teaching Fellow (DiTF) program, which pairs graduate students with faculty to develop digital active learning projects in their courses, is extending to other FAS departments with a HILT grant project helmed by history professors Dan Smail and Ann Blair.