Incubator Director Sue J. Goldie welcomed decision science faculty Myriam Hunink, Joe Pliskin, and Ankur Pandya, along with decision science PhD students, to the Incubator in December to discuss the evolving teaching/learning landscape and innovative ways to teach students in the modern classroom. With facilitation support from visiting faculty contributor Terry Aladjem, participants discussed ways to use visual literacy, multimodal techniques, and active-learning strategies to improve student comprehension and retention of course material.
The group also watched pilot videos from the Incubator’s Learning Studios in which visiting faculty members, along with Harvard undergraduates, experiment with teaching new concepts using multimedia. In both the in-person discussions and the videos, the power of graphical representation to help teach and learn complex ideas was striking, and participants explored the reasons why visual literacy and frameworks can be so effective in explaining a concept.