Interactive Lecture

• Pre-planning – Set learning objectives and design holistically, selecting content and interaction techniques through a lesson planning process. 
  
• Setting the tone – Encourage a culture of engagement and community early on in your course. It's easier to establish behavior patterns up-front than it is to get people to change pre-established behavior patterns. 
  
• Framing and introducing activities – If you can articulate activities in advance, including their purpose, it will assist learners in mentally preparing and in understanding relevance. Example: "Today's lecture will include two-minute pauses at regular intervals. During these pauses, you are to turn to a peer and compare notes, recording questions you have related to the content on our course backchannel. The purpose of these pauses is two-fold; first, to give you a chance to digest the material and reflect on your understanding of it, and second, to bring areas that need clarification to my attention." 

1. Connect: Create a "hook," or an attention grabber, "kindle" the hook by allowing learners time to stop and think about it, and then create a "bridge" between the hook and what they already know to the content of the lecture. 
   
2. Organize: Design a visual organizer (see this example) to provide a map of the structure of your lecture to learners, then present the content in "chunks," allowing time for learners to process the chunk and commit it to working memory. 
   
3. Dual-Code: Encourage strong, deep learning through use of tactics like visual media, emphasis, concrete examples, providing elaboration, vocal tone, etc. Help learners rehearse, reinforce, and expand understanding by explaining ideas in their own words, exploring their emotional connections to content, or creating visual/physical representations of ideas. 
   
4. Exercise & Elaborate: Take regular breaks in the lecture to pose questions for thinking from various perspectives: content mastery, concept understanding, self-expressive, and interpersonal. Have learners apply what they've learned in a synthesis task that encourages holistic processing of the lecture (e.g. case studies, problem-solving activities, design tasks, predictive modeling, lab experiments, synthesis papers, etc.).   

• Marshall (2015): “[W]rite down the last movie you saw in a theater and then consider it in the context of our class discussion on gender: Does that movie challenge or conform to traditional representations? Is it progressive? Regressive? A mixture?”   
• McKinney & Graham-Buxton (2016, p. 405): “1) List at least five of the features common to most bureaucracies. (2) Briefly explain each feature. 3) Give a specific and concrete example of each feature from the bureaucracy here at this university. Use examples that you have directly experienced or observed.”  

• Class response systems and techniques allow instructors to collect real-time learner responses to inform teaching.  
• High-technology class responses might include software like Top Hat, Socrative, or Poll Everywhere. Top Hat is a CMU-supported product that requires students to purchase a license, though the others are free and can be accessed from any web-capable device. Low-technology class response might make use of hand raising or lettered/colored cards to indicate different responses.  

• LMS group tools can help establish teams or study groups and allow space for collaboration and co-construction of knowledge through the use of tools such as forums, wikis, links to collaborative editing or annotation software, etc.  
• The LMS can provide documents that students will need or want to reference for active work during a session, like wireframes and diagrams to complete, problem sets, cases to consider, notes for individual or group completion, etc.  
• LMS survey tools can also support pre-class & post-class surveying (Marshall, 2015; Jaschik, 2011). You might reach out prior to a session, introducing the topic and surveying learners’ knowledge and connection to that to tie it into the session. You might post-survey in a similar method, to build upon points of interest and address knowledge gaps. A similar effect can be achieved in real-time through class response.  

• Backchannels are used to solicit comments, questions, and feedback in a publicly accessible manner during an event. Though using Twitter hashtags is a popular solution for this, a Blackboard discussion forum could also work.  
• Social media spaces like private Facebook groups are also popular options for having more real-time, ongoing, easy-to-navigate conversations than those that often happen in LMS forums because people are often plugged into these spaces all day.   

• Peer Instruction or Team-Based Learning (Mazur, 1997; Team-Based Learning Collaborative, n.d.) – In peer instruction, an instructor poses a question or problem or scenario, asking learners to formulate a response. The instructor then reviews responses, asking learners to discuss their thinking with peers, recommitting to a response. The instructor then reviews responses again, deciding if further explanation is needed. This is an informal version of team-based learning, which combines individual readiness assurance testing (IRAT) with group/team readiness assurance testing (GRAT/TRAT) and group/team application exercises (GAE/TAE) (Team-Based Learning Collaborative, n.d.). Such approaches hold learners accountable for their pre-learning, aid teamwork and learning skills, and provide frequent, immediate feedback.  
• Guided Questions or Guided Inquiry (University of Miami, 2015) – Instructors can provide a question set fostering different types of thinking to spark learner application, asking groups to complete all or allowing some choice in what learners will tackle and present back to the larger group.  
• Making use of Content Curation, Dataquests, or Google Jockeys (Stoerger & Kreiger, 2016) – In this approach, learners or teams of learners are set to work to investigate or analyze an individual, a concept, a fact, a set of data, etc. and report back to the class on their findings and implications related to course content. Collaborative documents are a great way for teams of learners in a large session to independently collect information that they can then synthesize collectively into a useful product or conclusion.  

Additional resources

References