Weekly podcasts, a virtual reality experience involving Che Guevara, and a learning game with zombies are among the digital platforms a history professor has used to enhance her teaching and make the subject engaging, especially for large classes of hundreds of students.
Juliette Levy, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, described her experiences in the second of three lectures on digital history sponsored by the MIT History Section.
Key to Levy’s approach to teaching is putting the student first in curriculum design. Often, she said, “courses are designed to deliver content, and the student is sort of incidental to the equation.”
As a result, among other techniques, she incorporates into her teaching technologies that today’s students are quite familiar with. “There are profound structures of learning that are totally different today than they were 20 years ago, and we need to think about that,” Levy said.