Online classes don’t have to be boring | Science - The Verge

Mary Beth Griggs, Science Editor at The Verge argues, The pandemic is terrifying — it might also be an opportunity for educators to engage students in new ways.

A teacher leads an online class in Berlin
Photo: Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images

YearsYears before the pandemic, planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton was thinking about the best way to change the world. In conversations with her husband and son, she kept coming back to one thing: education. More specifically, teaching people skills that will help them continue to learn even after school and help make a difference in their own communities. “Every person has their own miraculous ability to find and solve problems,” Elkins-Tanton says.

Elkins-Tanton is a professor at Arizona State University and the principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission to visit a metal asteroid. She’s also co-founder of Beagle Learning, a startup that has developed an online platform to support inquiry-based learning.

In a nutshell, inquiry-based learning lets students guide their classes by asking questions and then finding their own answers. The idea has been around for decades, but with the pandemic, teachers and schools are trying to figure out how to bring that method online. In the college-level course she teaches, students set their own ambitious goal for the semester, or they set a goal together for the class. (One example goal: “I want to learn what the universe is made of.”) Each week, they ask questions to get them closer to that goal and do their own research to find answers. Then they meet up for a weekly Zoom discussion where they talk about what they learned with other students and ask new questions to answer the next week. By the end of the class, they’ve developed their own “textbook” of information. 

That method won’t translate to all other classes. There’s no way to skip fundamental skills like reading or math...

What we did was we asked students, “What was your biggest question from today’s lecture?” That was a little exercise to take three minutes at the end of class online. Sometimes you can just do it as homework, you don’t even have to take class time. Then we would supply the professor with all the questions. The professor would spend 10 minutes at the beginning of the next class answering the key questions. And just from that degree of inquiry and student engagement, his class attendance went up by 50 percent compared to his previous several years.   

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Source: The Verge