Faculty/Course Development News

Bringing Generative AI to the Harvard Classroom

Bringing Generative AI to the Harvard Classroom

January 29, 2024

During the fall of 2023, teams from the Bok Center visited 18 departments and programs across Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to offer a 60-minute workshop on generative AI and its applications for teaching and learning. Tailored to the disciplinary contexts of both faculty and Teaching Fellows/Teaching Assistants, the workshops featured interactive demonstrations showcasing how instructors could take advantage of generative AI to improve their teaching methods and how students could be guided to utilize AI for enhanced learning experiences. We’ve shown Statistics...

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Supporting Visiting Faculty

November 27, 2023

Did your EALC student submit his DAO letter by Fifth Monday?

When you talked to ATG and ESS about AV support for your lecture in CGIS, did they ask for a 33-digit billing code?

Can I print my paper at the SOCH on my way to the QRAC?

Every university speaks its own language, its own distinctive lexicon full of rapidfire acronyms and well-worn campus shorthand that separates those who are in-the-know from... Read more about Supporting Visiting Faculty

Mark Hatzenbuehler

Destigmatizing Pedagogy

November 1, 2023

While some faculty come to the Bok Center for help in getting started on designing a new course or trying a new teaching technique, many of the 150+ faculty with whom we consult every year arrive already equipped with an ambitious plan informed by years of experience creating transformative learning experiences for their students. In those cases, we are happy to partner with faculty to hone and scale their plans, whether it’s the choreography of a single in-class activity or the logistics of supporting students through a semester-long research project involving multiple types...

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Christine D'Auria, Assistant Director of the Learning Lab, demonstrating a VR headset.

Media & Design Fellow Supports New Video Games Course

March 8, 2023

Carly Yingst, this year’s Media & Design Fellow in English, designed and facilitated an interactive, multi-station workshop for Professor Vidyan Ravinthiran’s course English 189VG: Video Game Storytelling. The Harvard Gazette featured the course, describing the workshop Carly took the lead in designing:

“As part of the curriculum, students attended a workshop hosted by The Bok Center’s Learning Lab, which sought to provide insight into the technical side of gaming. One...

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Sarah Lipson

Teaching and Mental Health

February 11, 2022

Faculty and Teaching Fellows often are in an excellent position to identify students and colleagues who are struggling, and to refer them to the right person or department for help. And yet, at the same time, many instructors understandably report that they feel uncomfortable and/or unprepared in reaching out to a student or colleague in distress. After all, most of us are trained to be teachers and scholars, not mental health professionals.

Recognizing this challenge, the Bok Center recently collaborated with...

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Flexibility in Form: Podcasting with Spanish 50

Flexibility in Form: Podcasting with Spanish 50

February 4, 2022

Over the last two years, we’ve all had to make adjustments to our plans, whether as instructors, students, or support staff. One of the Learning Lab’s Media & Design Fellows, Ignacio Azcueta, recently demonstrated the importance of developing resources and course plans that are responsive to quickly-changing conditions. At Bok, we are heartened by the adaptability of our fellows and their students.

Ignacio Azcueta (PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures) has been working as a Media & Design Fellow...

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Grace Burgin

Science through Story: Podcasts in OEB50

April 7, 2021

When OEB50: Genetics and Genomics wrapped in Fall 2019, Professors Robin Hopkins and Dan Hartl, who co-teach the course, decided to incorporate a creative project that would allow students to engage course material in new ways in the next iteration. Little did they know that the next iteration of the course would be on Zoom!

When it came time to design the creative project, Hopkins and Hartl turned to OEB graduate student Grace Burgin, a Media and Design Fellow at the Bok Center’s Learning Lab. ...

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Student leans over to better study a piece of art at the Harvard Art Museums

The Museum is your Classroom--Online

February 10, 2021

The Bok Center has been excited to collaborate with the Harvard Art Museums to bring ideas and strategies for teaching with museum collections to faculty and Teaching Fellows through a series of workshops and, for the first time this spring, a Bok Seminar. What started as an independent session run by Jen Thum (Assistant Director of Academic Engagement and Assistant Research Curator, Harvard...

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The cover image for the Voyager Golden Record resource created by the Bok Learning Lab.

Explore the Golden Record!

October 28, 2020

"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...

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