Skip to main content

Experiments in large classes

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...
Labels:

Comments

  1. Greg DelemeesterMarch 5, 2010 at 4:01 PM

    Have you ever seen anybody use clickers to conduct an in-class auction (or any other type of experiment, for that matter)?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...
3 comments
Read more

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Designing effective courses means thinking through the WHAT and the HOW (in that order)

I think most folks have heard by now that the California State University system (in which I work) has announced the intention to prepare for fall classes to be primarily online. I have to say, I am sort of confused why everyone is making such a big deal about this - no matter what your own institution is saying, no instructor who cares about their own mental health (let alone their students) should be thinking we are going back to 'business as usual' in the fall. In my mind, the only sane thing to do is at least prepare  for the possibility of still teaching remotely. Fortunately, unlike this spring, we now have a lot more time for that preparation. Faculty developers across the country have been working overtime since March, and they aren't slowing down now; we are all trying to make sure we can offer our faculty the training and resources they will need to redesign fall courses for online or hybrid modalities. But one big difference between the training faculty needed ...
Post a Comment
Read more