The Bok Center is excited to announce the launch of a new graduate fellow program, the Media and Design Fellows (MDFs)! As part of the Bok Center’s Learning Lab team, MDFs support innovative course development within the FAS, partnering with faculty and staff to design a variety of digital tools, course materials, and assignments for undergraduate courses and departments.

Across the disciplines, faculty and students are innovating by deploying richer media (3D models, high quality videos, well-designed infographics and illustrations) and richer interactions...

We are pleased to share that we have contributed a chapter to The Routledge International Handbook of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education!  Edited by Sabine Hoidn and Manja Klemenčič, Lecturer on Sociology, the Routledge Handbook provides a comprehensive examination of student-centered learning. Tamara Brenner,...

Back in July, Peter Girguis, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, reached out to the Bok Center after a series of informal conversations with faculty colleagues about their innovative ideas for the upcoming semester, which would be taught entirely remotely. The faculty Girguis encountered were working hard across the summer to develop innovative, rich experiences for undergraduates in the fall. While some types of...

As we prepare to launch a new academic year, a lot has changed at Harvard—including the terms in which we speak about teaching. Now, in addition to asking how many pages of reading a professor assigns, we’re comparing notes on how they balance the synchronous and asynchronous components of their course, as if we’ve been forming our personal opinions about asynchronous learning for decades rather than mere months. Yet there’s an awful lot about teaching and learning at Harvard that can’t, or won’t, be renamed at the speed of Zoom. So much of what we do in...

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is excited to announce that as part of the enhanced instructional support for remote teaching, departments that currently do not participate in the Pedagogy Fellows Program will be invited to apply to join for the 2020–2021 academic year. Pedagogy Fellows collaborate with faculty, administration, and the Bok Center’s senior staff to enhance training and support for teaching fellows within their departments and across the FAS. Consult the...

In a typical year, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab houses multiple intergenerational working groups we call “Labs,” each dedicated to a specific medium or tool used by courses we support: realityLab for 3D modelling and VR/AR, codeLab for web development, theatreLab for performance-based assignments, and so on. This year, when courses moved online in March, we had each and every one of our student fellows and staff join a central team called distanceLab, which was tasked with developing responses to the new challenges our faculty and students were facing in teaching and learning...

During the initial, headlong rush toward online teaching in March, nearly every conversation we had with the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with whom we work focused on the twin challenges of maintaining continuity and community. Whether we were facilitating faculty workshops, organizing graduate student Zoom trainings, or compiling and writing materials for our new Teaching Remotely website, this focus on continuity and community was at the core of what our partners wanted and what we wanted to help...

Congratulations to all on wrapping up the Spring 2020 semester!

As a way of marking the conclusion of this extraordinary semester, the Bok Center would like to conduct very brief (5–10-minute) recorded Zoom interviews with faculty where we capture one or two quick stories/reflections from your foray into remote teaching. Our hope is to edit together brief excerpts from these reflections to create a collective portrait of your experiences. If you would be willing to lend us a few minutes, please feel free to sign up for a convenient slot at the link below, and we will be in...

On 11 March, as Harvard students hurriedly packed up their dorm rooms, attended their final face-to-face course meetings, and said tearful goodbyes to their friends and mentors, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Stephanie Sandler composed an email to her students in GENED 1057: Poetry Without Borders. Reassuring them that their course would carry on with a refreshed...

When the Harvard Art Museums closed to the public just before Spring Break, it opened new doors in the online space. With numerous course collaborations scheduled for the remainder of the semester, the museums’ staff worked to transform gallery visits and classes in the Art Study Center into interactive visual learning experiences via Zoom.... Read more about Close Encounters with Original Works of Art—Despite the Distance

When word came that courses would be moving online for the remainder of Spring 2020, Learning Lab Graduate Fellow Phil Fahn-Lai knew that the science course for which he is a Teaching Fellow would face a particular challenge. Labs in OEB 126: Vertebrate Evolution, taught by Prof. Stephanie E. Pierce, involve visits to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where students view and interact with fossil specimens from the Museum’s Vertebrate Paleontology collection. The labs reinforce information learned in...