25 innovative ways: Enhance your teaching

Interactive teaching-learning tools can not only make teaching activities vivid but also increase students’ attention and the willingness of active learning in classroom. Some of the approaches are listed below. You all are requested to include at least 2-3 such techniques in your respective subjects and you should also then see its impact in a formal manner and come up with you experience and respective outcome in context of enhancement in the learning quotient. You can also adopt any other active learning approach into your classroom.

1. Flipped Classroom: It is a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional educational approach by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom and moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom model, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home and engage in discussing concepts in the classroom with the guidance of the instructor. It has resulted in a remarkably better student performance, with noticeable grade boost-up. Students can now learn at their own pace and communicate with their peers and teachers via discussions. There are many tools available that can be used to facilitate the Flipped classroom strategy. Students can be interviewed and asked to reflect on their learning and stress levels throughout the process. The students should fill a Student Reflection Survey in order to qualitatively explore student attitudes and beliefs towards their learning process.

2.    Role playing: Integrating experiential learning activities in the classroom increases interest in the subject matter and understanding of course content. Role plays give the students an opportunity to practice what they have learned in the class. It emphasizes the social nature of learning and cooperative behavior as stimulating students both socially and intellectually. The teacher should provide concrete information and clear role descriptions so that students can play their roles with confidence. Once the role play is finished, spend some time on debriefing. The students may be able to see their role play video later to make specific improvements in the performance. 

3.    Create a Class Blog or Wiki: A private class blog to help students extend academic conversations beyond the classroom. Encourage students to respond to in-class lessons or current events and topics, and devise a system for posting thoughts, news or impressions of them to a class blog or Wiki through comment section. It serves the dual purpose. One is that students learn to express themselves in a semi-formal manner and are able to give shape to their ideas. Another is that due to conversation a social space is created which indirectly helps them in their social and emotional IQ.

4.    Using Podcasts: Instructor produced podcasts produce multi-media podcasts as supplements to course units or topics, provide feedback on work to students or create short overviews of lectures for preview and review by students. In students produced podcasts, students explain or teach a concept, or detail problem-solving methods, summarize readings or lectures as a study aid to other students or produce a project as a service-learning or public engagement activity. Instructors should create audio/video material for learning ‘on demand’, anytime/anywhere, e.g. lessons and instructions for homework and exam revision which students and their parents can access in their own time

5.    Using case studies: Many students are more inductive than deductive reasoners, which mean that they learn better from examples than from logical development starting with basic principles. The use of case studies can therefore be a very effective classroom technique. Students are actively engaged in figuring out the principles by abstracting from the examples. This develops their skills in problem solving, analytical tools, quantitative and/or qualitative, depending on the case, decision making in complex situations and coping with ambiguities. Introduce the case briefly and provide some guidelines for how to approach it. Clarify how you want students to think about the case. Break down the steps you want students to take in analyzing the case.

6.    Encourage Active Learning: Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves. Active learning essentially boils down to activities that students are supposed to do to understand the concept that needs to be covered to fulfil the outcomes. In this type of setting, the focus entirely shifts from the lecture to activity. There should not be more than 20% of lecturing in any class and rest of the 80% should be spent on student activities. Please remember, that it requires more effort at the part of the instructor to be well prepared to make such activities engaging and interesting.

7. LMS: There are many LMS solutions available in the market. All have some common elements and some unique elements to make themselves attractive. For example, MOODLE is a free software package designed to help lecturers and students as a tool to provide in creation of quality teaching. The MOODLE is abbreviated to Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Using the Blackboard Learn LMS (Learning Management System), you can bring your classroom online. With tools to engage, collaborate, grade, track assignments and more, you can reach students effectively to ensure they are interacting with the content and curriculum in the most effective ways. Add resources for students to access online. Powerpoint, Captivate, video, audio, animation, and other applications are created outside of Blackboard and can be added into Blackboard courses for students to enhance teaching and learning efforts. Lecturers should be registered as users to edit the course’s site, including modifying the activities and marking students.

8. Brainstorming: Brainstorming is a large or small group activity that encourages students to focus on a topic and contribute to the free flow of ideas. By expressing ideas and listening to what others say, students adjust their previous knowledge or understanding, accommodate new information and increase their levels of awareness. Its main purpose is to encourage learners to take risks in sharing their ideas and opinions and demonstrate to students that their knowledge and their language abilities are valued and accepted. The teacher should begin a brainstorming session by posing a question or a problem, or by introducing a topic.

9. Web based presentation software: Web-based presentation software and storytelling tool help you in exploring and sharing ideas on a virtual canvas. Prezi lets you create non-linear, zooming presentations. Create a map of your ideas, images, videos, then show overview, zoom to details, amaze and convince. Prezi's open, zoomable canvas lets you show the relationships between the big picture and fine details, taking viewers on a compelling, informative journey they're not only likely to enjoy more, but remember and act upon. 

10. Use of social media: N number of Social media tools are available to help interaction between different cohorts. Slack is a teaming tool with good feedback from many instructors. It helps you to integrate the feeds from different social media tools at one place and gives you a good feel of the activities going on in different teams. Scoopit is a social media publishing platform where users curate content on their favorite topics and share it as a visual magazine. It allows you to collect websites, especially social media websites, in one place and save/share them. It also helps you to find relevant information and is easily searchable. Curating an online topic also increases self-awareness and provides additional insight from others. 

11. Promoting Innovation Pedagogy: Just as students require support to ensure maximum achievement of educational objectives, those who are delivering instruction require an institutional support structure that enables and encourages them to teach with excellence and effectiveness. An ongoing challenge is to elevate undergraduate teaching to an equal level with graduate education and research. It is becoming increasingly important to expose the undergraduate students in research related activities. There are many examples where it has brought wonderful results. Due to the wealth of information available to youngsters at an early stage; now they are able to make many innovative concepts at an early stage of their college studies. One of the methods for this is that every course must involve few hours set for the students to be exposed to the latest research in the field. Sometime, it may involve taking them to a real industry or research lab where the niche applications related to their learning are being developed.

12. Online quizzes and polls: These are very popular with some instructors. There advantage is that you get immediate results and feedback. Tools such as Quibblo, ProProfs, Google Forms, Flubaroo, Quizlet, Survey Anyplace enables anyone to create appealing mobile quizzes and surveys to engage with audiences on the go. One can use the feedback from students, parents, peers to increase satisfaction and participation.

13. Collaborative Quizzes: Cooperative quizzes turn assessment into a learning tool that improves understanding, retention, and motivation. Groups are responsible for coming to consensus on each answer, which will require them to discuss and debate course material. Students’ grades are calculated by weighting both the individual and the group assessment. This strategy encourages thoughtful discussion and more sophisticated understanding of major course concepts by engaging students.

14. Student Response System: Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational games and exercises via smartphones and tablets. Their apps are super simple and take seconds to load and run. Teachers control the questions and games on their laptop, while students respond and interact through their smartphones/laptops.

15. Special effort for weak and brilliant students: Students who require additional academic support are twined with bright students who serve as their mentors and help them in solving their problems. Clubbing weaker students with brighter students for assignments or micro projects, motivational techniques, constant monitoring of performance of weaker students. Research assignments to brilliant students encouraging them for publishing their research work in conferences etc. Instructors should create differentiated materials that can be matched to the abilities, needs and motivation of different students, e.g. audio extension activities for good students and audio support materials for an average student.

16. Changing Assessment strategies: Many times it is important to change the assessment strategies just to bring a change the monotonous exam system. Peer assessment in many cases has turned out to be double-advantage tactic. Apart from reducing the workload of the instructor, it also gives a real insight to the learners when they find themselves into the shoes of an assessor. In that case they also understand the true reasons of their level of performance. Other idea is to do the grading with Recorded clips. This strategy turn grading assignments or papers into an invigorating conversation with students with the use of with digitally-recorded comments.

17. Using stories and models: It helps students to fully explore a discipline even though they are novices. Explaining concepts in a surprising fashion helps students to retain information and improve interest. Of course, it will require creativity to come up with new stories and models. Team work of cohort of teachers will help in making a database of such resources. Many times it will also need additional support and help from the administration. This technique has undoubtedly resulted in positive perception about the course and the instructor amongst the students.

18. Using OER: Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.

19. Micro-teaching: It is a organized training improvement technique whereby the teacher reviews a videotape of the lesson after each session to find out what has worked, which aspects have fallen short, and what needs to be done to enhance their teaching technique and to acquire new skills. Many of the topics we teach can really fit into this concept. We need to break our lengthy lectures into micro modules and then focus on each micro concept and see how well it can be taken up in the class with the help of different teaching-learning resources.

20. Learning design informed by analytics through dynamic assessment: It refers to the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. As learning is taken online, there are opportunities to collect data on student activities and analyze these, both to inform the design of new courses and to improve the learning experience. The data can also be linked with test results to show which learning activities produce good results and to identify where learners are struggling.

21. Field visits and trips: Students go outside the classroom - to the industry, garden, tube well, dam, or to a museum, etc to observe specific phenomena, or to hear information from experts. When the class returns, each group might be asked to use the information that they have gathered to prepare presentations or reports of their observations. The purpose of the trip is usually observation for education, non-experimental research or to provide students with experiences outside their everyday activities, such as going camping with teachers and their classmates.

22. Community of Practice: The idea of communities of practice (CoP) is that learning occurs in social contexts that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals. This concept comes from the already existing communities around the world who had perfected different arts and techniques in a wide ranging set of activities. Many of these people and communities have no formal education in that but still there work is amongst the best. We need to evolve similar CoP in our institutions. Now it is even easier with the help of internet enabled communication methods.

23. Project based learning: It is a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems and challenges, simultaneously developing cross-curriculum skills while working in small collaborative groups. Since it is filled with active and engaged learning, it inspires students to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they're studying. In the process of completing their projects, students also sharpen their organizational and research skills and develop better communication with their peers.

24. Use of AR and VR Tools: This is latest entrant into the world of education. Now few organizations has developed the tools and technologies where the students can immerse themselves into the augmented reality or virtual reality environment and get the learning in the fastest way possible. How to act in critical situations can be taught by using these tools. An individual’s ability to handle difficult situations can be tested using these tools. Many institutions are using these to teach driving and also to train pilots. Every day, we mind new applications that are evolving out of AR and VR research to enable more sophisticated teaching learning experience.

25. Use of Virtual Labs for the experiments: Now it is not necessary to have costly equipment’s or software at your location to experiment or fulfil your course requirements. Many private cloud based systems are offering virtual labs for all popular courses at a very reasonable cost. For most of the laboratory experiments it also has the advantage that you don’t waste time in procuring, setting and installing that experiment requirements. There are other inherent advantages of using such systems. The virtual labs have evolved over a period and are improving at a fast rate. Instructors should get themselves accustomed to these new concepts so as not to be left useless for the futuristic teaching learning methods.

Published by Prof. Deepak Garg, Professor and Head, Computer Science and Engineering, Bennett University, Greater Noida