Theme: Hands-on Teaching

The Lightning Talks speaker event is a reflection and learning forum where Boston University faculty and invited guests identify areas of challenge and opportunity and share strategies for engaging educational experiences in the in-person environment. The speaker series, co-hosted by Digital Learning & Innovation and The Center for Teaching & Learning, is open to BU faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars.

Summer 2020 Speaker Series: A hands-on classroom experience is the academic foundation for many disciplines. But how can faculty inject experiential learning techniques when teaching online? The faculty panel shares their challenges and successes in the lab, studio, music and art rooms, and highlight ways to bring the “hands-on” experience to the online classroom.

Video Topics

Watch the individual, five-minute video presentations:

• Approaches to Remote Laboratory Instruction: A Long-term View
• Look, Feel, Sound: Translating the Applied Music Lesson to the Remote Classroom
• Moving the Engineering Lab Experience Out of the Lab
• Promoting Interaction in Synchronous Classrooms with Google Jamboard

One of the bigger revelations was seeing how Jamboard can be used in multiple ways, testing it out on one’s own (as I had done previously), I’d missed so much. I can see this in use not only in class but in committee….brainstorming, planning…. – Hands-on Teaching Lightning Talk Attendees

About the Moderator: Seth Blumenthal

Seth Blumenthal is a Senior Lecturer in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. His research focuses on the intersection of youth culture and conservative politics in the 20th century. Blumenthal’s first book, Children of the Silent Majority: Youth Politics and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980, won the New England Historical Association’s James P. Hanlan Book Award.

Professor Blumenthal brings his own interests and research to his teaching, with classes like “Imagining Vietnam: The Big Muddy in American Culture,” “Marijuana in American History,” and “High Stakes: Creating Social Equity in the Massachusetts Cannabis Industry,” which he co-taught this year in the Hub Cross College Challenge. In addition, his service-learning course, titled “The Educated Electorate,” requires his students to volunteer with political campaigns, nonprofits, and other groups, and then present a research paper related to students’ own experience in political activism. In 2020, Seth was recognized with Boston University’s Metcalf Award for Teaching Excellence.