A chemistry instructor turns to interactive flat-panel technology to engage students during remote learning mandates

How one instructor made remote chemistry instruction engaging


A chemistry instructor turns to interactive flat-panel technology to engage students during remote learning mandates

Every fall semester at UC Berkeley, the 534 seat auditorium in Pimentel Hall swells to capacity three times daily to welcome the nearly 1,500 freshmen enrolled in Chemistry 1A. Half a dozen large video screens, including one towering 20 feet above the main stage, help bring the lecture experience closer to the student audience. Almost of necessity, there is a vital theatrical element to how my colleagues and I teach in Pimentel Hall. A well planned, high production value, interactive experience is part of a strategy to keep students engaged. Demonstrations are flashy. Explosions are loud.

Nevertheless, it’s been said a college lecture is a process of passing information from an instructor’s notes to the students’ notes without passing through the heads of either. Thus, keeping students focused and engaged in the learning process in such a larger than life, potentially intimidating environment is challenging. Part of our strategy is peer-based and uses flipped classroom learning techniques adapted over years of tinkering to the large lecture hall setting. Students participate in frequent, conceptual, and meticulously designed clicker quizzes, which provide an interactive experience and prompt reflection and discussion with nearby students and graduate student instructors (GSIs) in the auditorium. The result is a practical, relatively personal, and popular introduction to general chemistry.

Then came the pandemic. Like so many institutions, Berkeley was compelled to transition to 100 percent remote learning. On very short notice, we faced the prospect of delivering the same high level of interactive, engaging learning entirely online for the 2020 summer session. A Zoom meeting wasn’t going to cut it.

Instead, we employed a blend of online, interactive technologies simultaneously. First, a YouTube live stream for the real-time lecture was combined with a live chat stream monitored by GSIs for questions and comments in real-time. Second, students watched the live stream in small-group Zoom breakout rooms where they used an iClicker system to respond to quizzes together. Finally, a custom and immediately available video review suite afforded an opportunity for asynchronous learning. Students felt safe and welcome in small Zoom-bomb-proof groups within this environment, just like sitting with their friends in a lecture. They participated in the flipped classroom from their breakout rooms – guided by GSIs and myself, who could pop into individual rooms – while the entire class joined up in watching and chatting on the live streams.

The entire process may sound complicated. It was, especially at first. But our decision to use a large-format touch screen as the focal point and command center for live and interactive components eventually made the entire online course run like clockwork. We settled on an 86-inch Promethean Titanium ActivPanel touch screen nearly the size of one of the eight chalkboards in Pimentel Hall (where we intend to use it when we resume teaching on campus). There is no software subscription or ongoing contract we had to sort through, and the company and distributors worked closely with us to meet the aggressive timeline we had to launch the course. Because many of its features are built-in and ready out of the box, the ActivPanel is a welcome change from overhead projectors and chalkboards. It’s essentially a giant tablet, and the intuitive interface immediately lent itself to delivering and managing the online course in real-time.

With the help of a pair of student instructors, we moved the touch screen into my spare bedroom “studio” where we broadcast the live streams. Our students joined real-time lectures from time zones all over the world. Because the live streams and asynchronous video are openly available, viewership far exceeds enrollment. The panel’s built-in Android OS makes the process feel more like teaching from a tablet, and the touch screen allowed us to seamlessly switch applications and keep students engaged. With the swipe of a finger, we could run and annotate the PowerPoint presentation, show video chemistry demonstrations, run well known interactive chemistry apps in a large, full-screen format, manage the interactive concept tests, and zoom rooms from a single platform.

We pushed the limits of the technology and the panel, and there was a great payoff. In their evaluations, many students commented on how helpful (and cool) it was to show a video demonstration, pause it, zoom in, and annotate to really explain what was going on. We’ve also had tremendously positive feedback on using the ActivPanel in the studio, where students could see me use the panel just as it would appear in the classroom. The overall learning experience was very similar to our live classroom. We commonly heard from students that, in this case, online learning wasn’t isolated learning, and this course made up for some of the disappointment they felt over not being able to come to campus for their first semester at Berkeley.

At UC Berkeley and beyond, I do not doubt that interactive flat panels will continue to spark innovation in the higher education space. The number of instructors employing interactive educational applications and flipped classrooms are skyrocketing. An interactive flat panel amplifies and enhances these and many other educational experiences in the classroom and online; they are a near-perfect marriage of pedagogy and technology.

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