Harvard professor uses technology to engage audience

By Kelline Linton
Chief Copy Editor

Dr. Eric Mazur, Friday’s breakfast keynote speaker at the ACU ConnectEd Summit, used his Peer Instruction method to actively engage his listening audience.

Mazur, professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, developed this method as a means to interactively teach large lecture classes.

The technique incorporates the “clicker method,” where his students or Friday’s audience members answered multiple-choice questions on their iPhones or iPod touches. The feedback is immediately displayed on a screen at the front of the room. But Mazur does not stop with this. He gets his audience to answer the same question again, this time after discussing their reasoning and first answers with their peers. After the feedback and audience responses are displayed a second time, he finally discusses the question and answer. Mazur said this process is interactive, not merely a polling technique.

“This technique engages. Lectures focus on delivering information,” he said. “Despite Gutenberg’s invention, we are clinging to our monopoly on information.”

Mazur stressed education is more than information transfer.

“We are not using our books to their full potential, yet,” he said. For this very reason, Mazur developed the “clicker method” for the classroom environment.

As he stressed to his audience, active engagement greatly improves learning gains. And, technology is the catalyst that will help transform the classic classroom to a more engaging environment conducive to a higher learning curve.