For the Future of Learning, Look to… Ancient Egypt

April 30, 2020
virtual Egyptian gallery

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 where students receive direct training in the skills they need to demonstrate their understanding of a key course concept. If anything, this has become even more essential in the age of remote teaching, something we have seen firsthand as we have collaborated with instructors like Prof. Peter Der Manuelian and the students enrolled in his course GENED 1099: Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us?.

For the past several years, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab has helped Prof. Manuelian develop and deploy a virtual curation project for GENED 1099. For this project, students act as curators, designing virtual 3D museum spaces and filling them with digital models of real artifacts from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and museum collections all over the world. The Learning Lab (LL) continued to support the project this spring, inventing new ways to help students with their projects as instruction and support moved online. Our team led a synchronous workshop for students in the course on the video game-building tool Unity3D to get students started on their projects. Paired with that session, we created a dedicated website to support the assignment, with examples, 3D models, and video walkthroughs. Prof. Manuelian provided a library of freely downloadable 3D models of ancient Egyptian artifacts on Sketchfab. Following that launch, LL Graduate Fellow Clarisse Wells and LL Studio and Technical Operations Coordinator Casey Cann hosted weekly staffed office hours to field student questions as they arose. Finally, to support students asynchronously through the completion of the project, we created an online help request form that enables our staff to respond to individual student requests with personalized tips and learning pathways and aggregate frequently asked questions for the rest of the class.

virtual Egypt museum

The Bok Center also supported GENED 1099 this spring through a new initiative that allocates Writing Fellows to General Education courses.  This initiative is supported by a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation, and offered in collaboration with the Harvard College Writing Program and the Program in General Education.  Writing Fellows are highly experienced preceptors from the Writing Program who work with the course teaching staff to optimize the alignment of writing assignments and feedback in Gen Ed courses with the skills and experiences that students acquire in their Expos seminars.

Tad Davies, the Writing Fellow who is supporting GENED 1099, initially planned to work with Prof. Manuelian and his Teaching Fellows on the course’s capstone project to clarify how and why students would choose one of three modalities (an essay, a short documentary video, or a virtual exhibit of artifacts); reshape the assignment to connect students’ learning to their own lives; and add an artist statement to the project that would encourage students to reflect on their creative experience.

With the unexpected arrival of COVID-19 and the move to remote teaching, however, there were suddenly more things for Davies to do. For instance, he broke down the assignment further into component parts—an annotated bibliography and separate instructions for the artist statement—to better scaffold the project for remote learning. As with much of the pivot to online teaching, however, this improved scaffolding of a capstone assignment into well-sequenced, lower-stakes formative assignments reflects best teaching practices in general, and is thus an improvement that will translate back into the brick and mortar environment.

If you would like to redesign some aspect of your course with an eye to making it work remotely as well as face-to-face, please make an appointment with a member of our senior staff.