Study showing that intermittently breaking up online lectures with quizzes reduced the occurrence of mind wandering, increased the frequency of note taking, and facilitated more efficient learning (by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Schacter and former fellow Karl Szpunar).
A randomized experiment of HarvardX courses found that teaching staff taking an active role in MOOC discussion forums increased student participation and boosted their grades.
Chinmay Kulkarni (Carnegie Mellon University) published a study finding that globally diverse discussions boost student performance and engagement, suggesting that the geographic diversity of online classes can be an educational asset with careful design. In collaboration with Stanford and… Read more about Research: Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes
Diane Moore, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies and Education, collaborated with HDS and FAS colleagues to produce a six-module, online course offering through HarvardX called World Religions Through Their Scriptures. They designed all digital material for optimal engagement of the 130,000 enrolled students: “It’s essential to provide language and tools in order for students from diverse worldviews, religions, experiences, ages, and regions of the world to constructively interact around topics that often divide us.”
The benefits: Enabling interaction and discussion augmented the course experience for the 36,000 enrolled in her module. Moore was surprised by the quality and thoughtfulness of online threads: “The students—their voices, experiences, and contexts—became course resources. Engaging with others increased their retention of the content.” Read more about Online engagement: Designing a learner-centered HarvardX course
Search the Harvard Online Learning portal, an aggregator of online learning opportunities from professors, centers, schools, libraries, and initiatives across campus.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health master of public health (MPH) program, the first blended program offered at a Harvard professional school, enrolled its first cohort in June 2015.
In the fall of 2013, faculty members from Harvard College pilot tested the implementation of four new courses taught in the blended format, integrating HarvardX materials with face-to-face classroom methods. These four courses were previously existing General Education (Gen Ed) courses… Read more about Blended Learning Report (Bok Center)
Modules allow you to organize your content to help control the flow of your course.
Modules are used to organize course content by weeks, units, or a different organizational structure that works for your course. With modules, you are essentially creating a one-directional linear flow of… Read more about Modules (Canvas)
Canvas brings welcomed new functionality and provides a rich set of tools previously unavailable within course sites, including an instructor dashboard called “course analytics” that shows both aggregate course and individual… Read more about Electronic Information in Canvas (Canvas)
The goal of the edX as an LTI Provider project, aka the HarvardX Hybrid, was to include edX content in a Canvas course. The results were initially piloted in fall 2015 with courses at HKS, FAS, and Harvard Chan. Though the scope of initial pilots has been modest, it is now… Read more about Integration between edX and Canvas (Canvas)
This site is designed to show some of the ways in which we have used Canvas and other tools to enable blended learning in a course at the Harvard Kennedy School: Professor Dan Levy's API-209 Advanced Quantitative Methods I course.
One paper articulates how questions and prompts for students to generate explanations—administered before, during, and after online learning—can improve cognitive processing by providing students with direction while allowing them to take charge of their learning.
