Transforming Lectures to Engage Students in Creating Knowledge

Students' unprecedented access to content on the web is providing a unique opportunity to transform the role lectures in education, moving the focus from content delivery to helping students synthesize the content into knowledge. We have introduced a variety of activities to facilitate this transformation at the University of Illinois, including web-based preflight assessments of student understanding before lecture, peer instruction (clickers) to assess and facilitate student understanding during lecture, and web-based multimedia pre-lectures designed to provide students with content before lecture. In this workshop we will discuss the pedagogical motivation for introducing these activities, the impact they have had at the University of Illinois, and how similar strategies might impact your classroom.