Making Learning visual : Helping students engage
Engage students encourage interaction
LEARN TOGETHER
How Tufts University Uses Visual Classrooms to take the distance out of online learning
Dr. Ethan Danahy uses Visual Classrooms to give his online robotics students the same interactive experience as students sitting in the classroom. Everyone is part of a collective design process, which encourages creativity and improves student satisfaction and persistence.
TUFTS UNIVERSITY IS A WORLD-RENOWNED RESEARCH UNIVERSITY WITH 11,000 STUDENTS LOCATED JUST OUTSIDE OF BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS.
Testimony
In this global world teamwork is critical, no one does anything alone, but instructors don’t provide many opportunities for students to practice working together as a team or to learn from other teams working on the same project. Technology is vital to this kind of collaborative learning and it must be a lead design goal. The Visual Classrooms collaborative workspace enables students to see, organize, build on, and synthesize one another’s ideas as they unfold in real-time.
- Dr. Ethan Danahy, Tufts University
Experiences
Ethan assigns a lot of group projects in his online Robotics Course. Visual Classrooms provides the structure and dynamic tools for continuous interactions among learners and their teachers. Using Visual Classrooms, students work together like expert teams to solve real, complex problems with no ready-made solution. Teams document the development of their designs in the online notebook. They discuss and try out different paths, review and comment on each other’s work, and go back and improve their designs.
Danahy believes that these conversations create personal connections to the material for students that increases their motivation and helps to create a dynamic online experience.