On March 29-30, 2012, Peter Dourmashkin, MIT, presented interactive workshops on Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) to 38 participants from Haitian schools and universities.
For the past ten years the Physics Department at MIT has developed a program called Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) which has fundamentally changed the way the introductory Newtonian Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism physics courses are taught at MIT. TEAL represents an attempt to incorporate a variety of new teaching ideas and technologies into first-year physics subjects. The course is a non-lecture based course with an emphasis on active engaged learning. Students work together in groups of three, using tabletop experiments and computer-based visualizations to develop their conceptual and analytic understanding of mechanics and electricity and magnetism. The syllabus is designed to integrate concepts, experiments, and problem solving skills in an interactive learning environment in which students regular discuss concepts and problems in class with their teachers. All of the course materials are now available in OCW Scholar. These workshops focused on describing TEAL and in particular how the TEAL materials on OCW Scholar can be adapted for use in teaching physics in many institutional settings.
About the Workshops
The main goal of these workshops was to start implementing faculty- and curriculum-development activities based on MIT’s Open Education Resources such as OpenCourseWare and Software Tools for Academics and Researchers. How can these resources be most constructively used to improve STEM courses in Haiti? How can similar resources be designed in situ by educators in Haiti and become fully functional?
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