The Lively Arts was selected as one of six departments to participate in the campus-wide “Creating Active Learning Through Technology” grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. $295,000 was received from the Foundation to support the redesign of high-enrollment general education classes on campus. The Foundation was established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after his retirement as Chairman of Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc.

The new grant builds on the successful work done in two earlier UMass-Amherst grants on active learning in large lecture classes. In the revamped courses, faculty followed a three-step process in their redesign efforts: (1) faculty utilized OWL, the Online Web-based Learning homework and learning environment developed on campus by the Center for Computer-Based Instruction Technology (CCBIT), to create assignments for students to do before each lecture in preparation for new material; (2) faculty incorporated the in-class use of a Personal Response System (PRS) which further engaged students during the lecture; (3) students returned to OWL for post-lecture “quizzes” to work with material presented in the lecture as well as to self-monitor their mastery of the subject.

The new Davis grant will enable recipients to create active learning both in the classroom using PRS and outside the classroom using OWL assignments. The grant extends previous work by integrating the in-class PRS questioning and activities with the out-of-class OWL assignments. This linkage will further reinforce the importance of preparing for each lecture and then participating in the class, as well as help personalize the large lecture experience for students.

The Lively Arts will further challenge the limits of these new technologies with its writing-intensive curriculum and use of multi-media clips of performing and visual arts images. Professor John Jenkins, The Lively Arts Director; Maren Brown, Director of the Fine Arts Center’s Education/Access Department and Professor Dennis Brown, Chair of the Music and Dance Department, will serve as the co-leads on The Lively Arts course redesign project.

To learn more about the successful technologies implementation on campus see http://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/pew/fairfield-2002.phtml (Biology /Microbiology redesign) see http://www.umass.edu/redesignproject/. (Departmental redesign of six departments) http://ccbit.cs.umass.edu/davis/index.html (large lecture course redesign project)