"In 1977 humanity sent a mixtape into outer space. The two spacecraft of NASA’s Voyager mission include a Golden Record, featuring greetings in 55 earth languages, 116 images of the planet and its inhabitants, plus examples of music from a range of cultures across the world: from Azerbaijani bagpipes to Zaire pygmy songs, from English Renaissance dances to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and from Louis Armstrong to Chuck Berry. The samplings of earthbound auditory culture are on their way into the unknown.”

So begins the course description for Alex Rehding’s...

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...

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...

Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (or LLUFs) are a core part of the intergenerational team at the Bok Center’s Learning Lab. LLUFs often have terrific intuitions about the pedagogy that will most engage and appeal to their peers, and they use this expertise as learners to help the Bok Center’s faculty partners design and test new learning experiences for their courses. Given the fact that many of these assignments and activities involve new or at least alternative modes of communication—drawing, speaking, coding, 3D...

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...

In our latest installment from the Learning Lab’s gameLab team, Graduate Fellow Clarisse Wells introduces two gaming concepts, Metagaming and Speedrunning, where players draw on their accumulated experience in order to optimize game mechanics and exploit trends in gameplay to create advantages and complete new challenges. While this might sound like “cheating,” in these posts...

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 they are 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...

One of the things we love most about our work in the Learning Lab is the challenge of responding quickly and dynamically to unusual requests in creative assignment design. One way we foster this dynamism is by leveraging our Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs), whose intuitions about what mediums and modes will appeal most to their peers yields ideas and resources that can be translated into the classroom in surprising ways. While the LLUFs certainly aren’t as expert as the faculty when it comes to the course material, they are inarguably experts on their own experiences...

At the Bok Center we’re fortunate to be able to partner with a wide array of instructors and courses, from engineering labs to writing seminars. These partnerships take many different forms, but the one constant is the depth of our engagement. We understand that helping an instructor formulate an effective or innovative experience or assignment is only part of our job. We’re also here to help the instructor bring that idea to life, whether that means offering specialized training to Teaching Fellows, a custom-built web resource to house student work, or workshops and hackathons...

Have you used active learning in your classes? If so, ABLConnect wants to know about it!

If you have developed and used an active learning exercise in your class recently, we'd love for you to submit it to the ABLConnect Teaching Innovator Prize, which celebrates Harvard University instructors who develop and use active learning in their classrooms! This year we are especially interested in submissions related to remote learning....

In a typical semester, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab hosts an array of workshops and hackathons on a wide range of skills, including photography, game design, animation, and  infographics.  These workshops help students in Bok-supported courses complete assignments and capstone projects. The Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs) are central to these efforts, having spent a year or more developing technical skills that they share with their peers.... Read more about Students Supporting Student Learning