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Friday, September 15
Moving from Practice to Research: Results from the Just-In-Time Teaching Project
Gregor Novak, Distinguished Scholar in Residence,–US Air Force Academy
12:00 pm–1:30 pm
Frangipani, IMU
*A buffet lunch will be provided from 11:30.*
Just-in-Time Teaching is presently used in over 200 science and humanities courses at more than 100 institutions. The JiTT pedagogy blends active learning classroom methods with web-based technologies. In preparation for an interactive classroom experience, students work with strategically constructed web-based assignments that are due just before class time. Instructors base the daily classroom activities on the student submissions. The preparatory work creates a need-to-know atmosphere and gives students a sense of ownership of the learning process. At the same time, JiTT provides information for instructors that can help them to understand better how students learn in a particular discipline and provide them with more precise information about how to structure questions and activities usefully in that discipline.
Gregor Novak, Professor of Physics Emeritus at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Air Force Academy, and colleagues developed Just-In-Time Teaching to move students beyond memorization to deeper kinds of learning. "The core element of JiTT is the interactive lecture" Novak explained to IU's Research and Creative Activity magazine in 1999. In one implementation, students do web-based Warm Up Exercises, which are due a short time before class begins. Instructors in the interactive lecture then adjust and organize lessons based on those student responses. The student input is "just in time" for the lesson, which allows instructors to engage them at the appropriate level of background knowledge and use their answers as input for discussion in class. The National Science Foundation has awarded JiTT several research grants, including $800,000 for the development of a digital library of JiTT resources. Nearly 10 years old, the project has moved from a community of practice among instructors in higher education to what Dr. Novak calls a "community of research." Dr. Novak is the 2005 recipient of the New York Academy of Sciences Willard Jacobson award for innovation in education.
In a lunchtime presentation, Professor Novak will discuss the evidence of student learning arising from the Just-In-Time Teaching project. This interactive event will describe central learning challenges that the project addresses and how a collaborative community of scholars has emerged to harness technological advances that can improve learning and teaching.
(See related JiTT events.)
For more on JiTT please visit www.jitt.org.
Gregor Novak is currently Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the United States Air Force Academy. His home institution is Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) where he is Professor of Physics. His primary scholarly interest is the application of multimedia technology to improve undergraduate physics teaching. Over his tenure on the faculty at IUPUI, Dr. Novak has been at the heart of numerous successful innovations for undergraduate physics teaching and learning. He has extensive leadership experience with faculty workshops having given several hundred invited workshops and presentations on technology in the physics classroom over the past twelve years. He is the co-author of Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Pedagogy, Prentice Hall (1999). Dr. Novak has received several teaching awards, including the 2005 New York Academy of Sciences Willard Jacobson Education Award and the 1998 Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching at IUPUI.
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