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The Science of Studying Student Learning at Scale

Campus Technology Insider Podcast

The Campus Technology Insider podcast explores current trends and issues impacting technology leaders in higher education. Listen in as Executive Editor Rhea Kelly chats with ed tech experts and practitioners about their work, ideas and experiences.


Imagine you're a professor teaching a course, and you want to test what teaching practices work best for your students. For example, is it better to give immediate feedback on assignments, or delay the feedback for a few days and give students an extra opportunity to process the concepts in their work? Even after testing each method and determining a result, it's impossible to know if your findings are unique to your own particular course or if they could apply to all students in general. To solve that problem, a team from Indiana University set out to expand the scope of pedagogical research by creating ManyClasses, a model for studying how students learn not just in a single classroom, but in a variety of different classes across multiple universities. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with researchers Emily Fyfe and Ben Motz about how ManyClasses works, the challenges of using a learning management system to conduct research, what they learned from the first ManyClasses experiment, and more.

Ben Motz and Emily Fyfe

Ben Motz and Emily Fyfe (photo courtesy of Indiana University Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences)

Resource links:

Music: Mixkit

Duration: 33 minutes

Transcript

Where to Listen

Campus Technology Insider is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify and Stitcher. Subscribe today or listen at campustechnology.com/podcast.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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