In EMR16 and Stat139, students periodically do very brief "mini-assignments" which require them to submit or consider something that the instructor incorporates into lecture.
Greg Kestin has been working with other staff of Harvard's wildly popular Science and Cooking class to create innovative educational videos as a supplement to lecture.
In Law and American Society, Dr. Terry Aladjem's takes his students to visit a prison following a unit on punishment in order to apply theories of punishment to the real world.
In Nathan Kaplan's general education course EMR 14, "Fat Chance," students play games to connect the probability concepts learned in lecture to some fun activities that the students are familiar with. On some broader level, the goal is to see that probability is at work in lots of situations outside of the somewhat artificial classroom setting.
Students in Caroline Light's general education course, Sex and the Citizen, create five-minute visual essays in response to Brenda Weber's, Makeover Nation. In order to do this assignment, students must complete the assigned reading and gain familiarity with iMovie, Prezi, or PowerPoint. These visual essays or makeover parodies are meant to address issues of identity and citizenship central to the course.
Emily Russell designed this for Physics 95: Topics in Current Research aimed towards junior and senior concentrators in Physics. Students were encouraged to develop their skills in explaining complicated physics topics in layman’s terms through a short video presentation. This project incorporates public speaking skills and video technology like Final Cut Pro.
Created by Moriah Beck, Masih Shokrani, Karen Koster, William Soto, David McDonald, and David Swanson for the National Academies Northstar Institute for Undergraduate Teaching in Biology, this activity spans 2-3 classes and uses lecture, clicker questions, jigsaws, and group discussions to teach the relationship between protein structure and function.
Created by Ned Dochtermann, Erin Gillam, Timothy Greives, Kristina Holder, Steve Travers, and Jennifer Weghorst, this lesson focuses on the evolutionary mechanism of random genetic drift. Students explore how population size affects allele frequencies by engaging in a group activity that involves generating and plotting data, interpreting graphs, and formulating hypotheses.
Students were asked to produce a multimedia and historical analysis of the archives of Saudi Aramco World. It aimed to bring historical and secondary sources alive by putting students directly in contact with primary, archival sources and asking them to critically engage with those materials.
Pia Sörensen detailed out this month-long procedure for Science and Cooking students' final projects, which involve a report and a presentation on a food science related topic of a student groups' choice.
Students apply what they have learned in the classroom to their own dinner plates by creating a meal based on principles of health and sustainability that are attentive to personal, local, and global considerations.
To gain practical experience in investment situations, students pitch real estate investments to their peers and determine where to allocate their capital.
Students take part in a three day simulation of a cold war-era international crisis to experience the challenges of nuclear weapons decision-making and better understand the history of the Cold War.