The history and evolution of educational technology platforms for teaching ecology

Background/Question/Methods

There is lots of evidence that students learn better when they are actively engaged in constructing their own knowledge. While this is widely known among instructors across science and engineering fields, most science classes still tend towards passive teaching. A major reason that active learning classrooms are not more widespread is that most instructors do not have training in active teaching techniques, which can be hard to do well, nor the time needed to learn. Technology has potential to lower the barrier for implementing active teaching by providing tools that make it easier both to introduce small active elements, all the way to scaffolding a transition to a flipped or other highly active classroom. In ecology, as in most sciences, this potential has been only partly fulfilled.

Results/Conclusions

In this talk, I'll start off the symposium by reviewing how technologies have helped instructors make ecology classes more active over the past several decades, and in particular how various computer-based technologies are being integrated into the three pillars of a typical ecology class: the lecture, the lab / recitation, and the homework. After looking at some popular virtual ecology lab platforms, I'll focus on some of the lessons learned from these. I'll end by exploring how current computer technologies could be enhanced to make building flipped and other active classrooms more feasible for busy instructors, and therefore encourage wider adoption of these more effective teaching styles.