MIT-Haiti Workshops on Technology-Enhanced and Open Education
Université d’État d’Haïti, Campus Henry Christophe Limonade
Monday–Thursday, June 13–16, 2016
Organizers: Audalbert BIEN-AIMÉ (Université d’État d’Haïti, Campus Henry Christophe)
Michel DeGRAFF (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Date of Memo: May 25, 2016
Dear colleagues,
The MIT-Haiti Initiative and the State University of Haiti at the Campus Henry Christophe Limonade (CHCL) cordially invite you to submit an application for participation in the next Technology-Enhanced and Open Education workshop, to be held on June 13-16, 2016, at the Campus Henry Christophe, Limonade, Haiti.
This workshop is part of a 5-year project, funded by the U.S. National Foundation and CHCL (UEH), and with additional funding from the the Campus Henry Christophe, Limonade, of the State University of Haiti and from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The goal is to develop and disseminate open-resource materials for active-learning techniques toward improving the teaching and learning STEM in classrooms in Haiti.
This forthcoming workshop on June 13-16 is the seventh MIT-Haiti workshop on STEM since the Initiative began in October 2010. The goal is to continue exploring current research and practice on learning and pedagogies related to active learning in Kreyòl. Actively engaging students with materials in their native language has been shown to increase students’ motivation to learn and improve their learning outcomes. This workshop will have 4 discipline tracks: mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry. A second goal of this workshop is to develop discipline-related communities of practice that support use of active learning in Kreyòl in the classroom.
The June 13–16 workshop will introduce several new activities that will distinguish it from the workshops already held in 2012-2015: Participants will deepen their practice of the fundamentals of active learning. They will be acquire a stronger basis for preparing lesson plans in Kreyòl, including learning objectives alongside exercises
and evaluation instruments that match these objectives. In the first three days, there will be an increase emphasis on application of active-learning principles through practical activities, according to the classroom needs of participants. We will co-create activities and materials in Kreyòl for participants’ immediate use in their own classrooms, according to information that they will share with us, in advance of the workshop, about the contents of their course. In the fourth day, we will work on understanding how to motivate students, and discuss challenges to implementing active learning in the classroom. The focus of the afternoon session will be on creating effective syllabi and effective classroom presentations.
Another significant novelty is that this will be the first workshop to offer sessions on active learning in chemistry. The chemistry session will focus on creating examples that actively engage the students and relate basic chemical principles to cutting edge research and applications in human health.
