Active Learning with Melinda Owens

11/30/22 • 34 min

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Wouldn't it be interesting to see an analysis of how much time you spent on active learning, right after class ended? DART is a tool created by a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of education researchers. DART stands for Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching. All you have to do is record your class session with your phone and upload the recording to the DART website. DART’s machine learning algorithms will then analyze that audio and let you know how much of your class time was spent on lecturing versus active learning.

I first heard about DART a few years ago, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about it ever since. I reached out to Melinda Owens, assistant teaching professor in neurobiology at the University of California San Diego and one of the lead developers for DART, and she was excited to talk with me about DART. Melinda shares a bit about her journey into education research, the origins of DART, and how college faculty can use DART to better understand and improve their own teaching.
Episode Resources:
Melinda Owens’ faculty page, https://biology.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/mtowens.html

DART website, https://sepaldart.herokuapp.com/

“Classroom sound be used to classify teaching practices in college science courses,” Melinda Owens et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:12, https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1618693114
Music:
"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay

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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.

DART website, https://sepaldart.herokuapp.com/

Support the show

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Previous Episode

AI Writing with Robert Cummings

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A few years ago you could assume that if a student submitted an essay in your class, some human wrote that essay, hopefully the student in question. That’s no longer true, however, as AI-powered writing generators get better and better at producing intelligible text. What are we to do, whether we’re teaching writing or having students use writing to represent their learning?
On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I talk with Robert Cummings, associate professor of writing and rhetoric and executive director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi. Bob has spent his career exploring what’s coming in terms of teaching and technology, particularly in the field of writing instruction. These days, Bob is collaborating with computer scientists to figure out what role AI technologies might have in writing instruction.

I reached out to Bob to talk with me about the state of affairs in AI and writing, and we had a wide-ranging conversation that I’m excited to share here on the podcast.
Episode Resources:
Robert Cummings’ faculty page, https://english.olemiss.edu/robert-cummings/

OpenAI examples, https://beta.openai.com/examples
OpenAI Playground (account required), https://beta.openai.com/playground

Fermat Generative AI, https://fermat.ws/

Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer science, University of Oxford, https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/

Peter Elbow, emeritus professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, http://peterelbow.com/

Is There a Text in This Class? by Stanley Fish, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674467262

Emad Mostaque on the Hard Fork podcast, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/podcasts/generative-ai-is-here-who-should-control-it.html

“Moore’s Law for Everything” by Sam Altman, https://moores.samaltman.com/

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans, https://amzn.to/3UNC1Ed
Music:
"The Weekend" by chillmore, via

Support the show

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Next Episode

Student Success with Juan Gutiérrez

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“Service courses” are courses like college algebra and calculus that are taught by math departments to students not majoring in math, who take those courses typically to satisfy a major or general ed requirement. These courses are notoriously problematic, often with high drop-fail-withdraw rates or big gaps in student performance across demographic groups. Recently, I went looking for departments who are teaching service courses well. I found the math department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In just a two-year period, the DFW rate (that’s drop-fail-withdraw) in their service courses dropped from 35% to 25%. That’s a huge improvement in student outcomes, especially for a department that teaches eight or nine thousand students each year.
I reached out to Juan Gutiérrez, professor and chair of mathematics at UTSA, to ask about the changes the department made that lead to this improvement. He very graciously sat down with me for an interview, and I am very excited to share it here on the podcast. Juan shares some of his rather amazing life story, his goals for students success especially for the Hispanic students who attend San Antonio, and the data-driven and highly successful changes his math department made to college algebra, calculus, and other service courses.
Episode Resources:

Juan Gutiérrez’s faculty page, https://math.utsa.edu/directory/juan-gutierrez/

“A Department, Transformed,” https://math.utsa.edu/a-word-from-the-chair/
Music:
"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay

Support the show

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Intentional Teaching - Active Learning with Melinda Owens

Transcript

[00:00:00] Derek Bruff: Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Back in my thirties, I picked up running as a hobby. I'm not sure what motivated me other than a desire for physical fitness and a need to get out of the house, b