I primarily use Aplia to do experiments, rather than problem sets. When I started teaching the 500-seater, one thing I knew was that I didn't want to give up activities like having students participate in a market auction but I couldn't imagine how that would work in class so I adopted Aplia.Well, as I mentioned a while ago, there were a couple of presentations at the TIP conference in January that downright inspired me and one was by Jose Vazquez-Cognet, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who discussed the double-oral auction that he does with his class of 800. To be clear, he does this in class, not using Aplia or some other computer simulator - he actually has 800 students milling around, trying to buy and sell from each other! I would never have imagined trying this in such a large class but listening to him explain what he does, it actually does sound do-able. One thing that helps is he creates smaller trading pits within the room: students can trade with those in their immediate area but they can't go running around to the other side of the room. He also has figured out a way to have students switch roles, from buyer to seller or vice versa, without having to pass out new information sheets. I'm sticking with Aplia this semester but am definitely tempted to give it a try next semester...
As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
Have you ever seen anybody use clickers to conduct an in-class auction (or any other type of experiment, for that matter)?
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