Minerva

Active Learning Forum: "Seminar on Steroids"

The Active Learning Forum is Minerva's core technology platform, and the Active Learning Seminar is its centerpiece. I devoted most of 2012 and 2013 to designing and prototyping the ALF, with the goal of developing a learning venue tailored for meaningful seminar discussion and targeted formative feedback. I worked with the very talented engineering team to turn these validated explorations into core components of Minerva's learning environment. I'm incredibly proud of what we've created.

What does a seminar look like on the Active Learning Forum? What does it mean to learn and teach in this classroom? While I frequently try to explain in conversation how this unusual classroom enables new forms of learning and teaching, it's much easier to communicate by showing it in action...

We devoted Chapter 15 of Building the Intentional University to discussing the Active Learning Forum in detail.

Course Builder: Technology for teams to build courses around Active Learning

I led the creation of Minerva's curriculum design technologies in 2016-2017. Unlike a "traditional" LMS, this curriculum management system is not student-facing. We decouple the tools and technologies for course design from those for teaching and learning. Chapter 16 of Building the Intentional University discusses our collaborative approach to curriculum development and the technologies that we created to support this approach.

Assessment tool suite: Formative feedback, in context

More recently, I designed and prototyped the first version of Minerva's technology to support formative assessment of (a.) classroom discussion contributions and (b.) homework submitted as a document, video, or website.

The classroom assessment tool was designed to provide students with structured feedback on their contributions to their classes on the Active Learning Forum. This tool makes a cameo appearance at 03:39 in the 2015 video embedded above.

I based the initial prototypes of the assessment tool for written assignments to conceptually mirror the tool for assessing classroom discussion. Assessments are still anchored in context, but "context" is now a text passage rather than a spoken comment. Other than that, the concept -- structuring formative feedback as annotations on the student's original work -- remains the same.

We devoted Chapter 17 of Building the Intentional University to discussing our approach to assessment in detail.

Degree Planner: Planning a course of study around graduation requirements

Designing a course of study (including degrees, majors, minors, and/or concentrations) that meets all of Minerva's graduation requirements is surprisingly complicated. In early 2018, I developed and launched a set of interactive web-based tools that were designed to support students and their academic advisors in exploring options and creating graduation-ready degree plans.

The Degree Planner relies on recently-added (2017) Course Catalog infrastructure within Course Builder that allows the Academic Team to easily manage and publish a versioned Course Catalog in various human-readable formats (e.g. PDF, HTML) and also in a machine-readable format. By aggregating the degree plans saved across all students, the Academic Team can now more accurately quantify student interest in each course for each future term. Additionally, the ability to automatically verify that a set of courses meets the graduation requirements for a set of programs serves another useful purpose: We can now accurately and efficiently verify that a student has completed all graduation requirements for their selected programs before we issue that student a diploma.

Academic records: Generating, archiving, protecting

In 2014, I designed and built Minerva's first system for generating academic transcripts (official and unofficial) and term reports based on the formative assessments collected using the tools above. A secure student-facing Registrar system provides each student with access to their documents. The site also provides the student a link to download a comprehensive machine-readable dataset including every score and every written comment given by all of their professors at Minerva.