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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250514T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250514T150000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20250415T184330Z
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UID:10282-1747231200-1747234800@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Building a Better Learning Experience: Using Student Data to Enhance Active Learning for Neurodivergent Students
DESCRIPTION:Image: Premium Graphics /Adobe Stock\n\n\n\nDr. Mariel Pfeifer\, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Mississippi \n\n\n\nDescription \n\n\n\nThis talk will present findings from research about optimizing active learning to better serve neurodivergent STEM learners. Attendees will leave with concrete takeaways\, including a general and a specific teaching tip that they can integrate into their courses to foster a more supportive learning environment for all students. Attendees will also receive additional resources to support future pedagogical decision-making. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\n\nMariel Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Mississippi. She is dedicated to promoting access to STEM fields for students and faculty with disabilities. Mariel earned her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia\, where she received both an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an ARCS Foundation award. As a trained biology education researcher and cell biologist\, she aims to leverage her expertise in research\, teaching\, and mentoring to help eliminate barriers in STEM education.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/building-a-better-learning-experience-ss-05-25/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Pfeifer_event-news.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251023T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251023T130000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20250916T215440Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250930T202234Z
UID:10914-1761220800-1761224400@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Doing “All the Things”: Leveraging Data\, Collaboration\, and Evidence-based Design to Transform Gateway Courses
DESCRIPTION:Image by alswart / Adobe Stock\n\n\n\nDr. Denise Galarza Sepúlveda\, Director of the University of Michigan’s Foundational Course Initiative (FCI) at the Center for Research and TeachingDr. Heather Rypkema\, Head of Learning Analytics at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) and Associate Director of FCI\, University of MichiganDr. Alicia Romero\, Lecturer III\, Department of Statistics\, University of Michigan \n\n\n\nDescription\n\n\n\nGateway courses play a crucial role at most institutions. They can be students’ only exposure to a discipline\, or a make-or-break experience that can alter their chosen career paths. For faculty and instructional teams\, teaching these courses can feel like having to do “all the things.” There is the crush of content as they prepare students to succeed in different downstream courses\, challenges in integrating active learning and authentic assessments\, heavy logistical demands\, and structural and resource constraints. Given these issues\, the task of redesigning these large gateway courses can feel unmanageable or even impossible for faculty. In this talk\, Drs. Galarza Sepúlveda and Rypkema will share a model that addresses the complexity of teaching and learning in these courses with a multifaceted and sustainable approach. This model is exemplified in the University of Michigan’s Foundational Course Initiative (FCI)\, which provides faculty with the resources\, support\, and design expertise to help them make high-impact changes while moving away from feeling they have to do “all the things.” Additionally\, Dr. Alicia Romero will join the discussion to share her experience teaching the FCI redesigned course for STATS 250. Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis. They will also discuss FCI’s course reports and provide redesign project examples from an array of FCI-partnering courses\, including Physics\, Engineering\, Earth and Environmental Sciences\, and Statistics. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speakers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDenise Galarza Sepúlveda is the Director of the University of Michigan’s Foundational Course Initiative (FCI)\, which provides faculty with the resources\, support\, and design expertise needed to create transformative learning experiences in large gateway courses. Dr. Galarza Sepúlveda establishes the program’s strategic priorities\, leads partnership recruitment efforts\, and manages a talented team of consultants dedicated to redesigning gateway courses. She also contributes strategic direction to the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching as part of its Senior Leadership Team. Before joining CRLT\, she served as director of the community-based learning office in the Division of Undergraduate Education at UM’s College of Literature\, Science\, and the Arts. \n\n\n\nDr. Galarza Sepúlveda received her Master’s degree from Purdue and her Ph.D. from Emory University\, both in Spanish. Prior to Michigan\, she held a faculty position for twelve years in Lafayette College’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. At Lafayette\, she also chaired the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Throughout her career\, she has received curricular design grants\, teaching awards\, and secured an endowment to support high-impact learning programs. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Heather Rypkema is Head of Learning Analytics at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan\, as well as an Associate Director with the Foundational Course Initiative (FCI). She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University and held faculty positions in Chemistry and Climate Science before transitioning to her current role at the interface of teaching and data analytics in 2018. She supports course and curricular design efforts through data collection\, analysis\, and triangulation of databases that include institutional\, LMS\, instructional technology\, and survey data. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Alicia Romero is a Lecturer III in the Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan\, where she leads STATS 250\, one of the university’s largest undergraduate courses with more than 2\,000 students each semester. She coordinates a large instructional team and has spearheaded major innovations through the Foundational Course Initiative\, including the integration of structured group work during lecture. She serves on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and advises undergraduate students. In 2024\, she was named a finalist for the Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/doing-all-the-things/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Featured-image.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251113T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251113T160000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20251023T160513Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251027T135947Z
UID:11133-1763046000-1763049600@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Compass: An Experiment in Collaboration
DESCRIPTION:Lily Tsai\, Ford Professor of Political ScienceAdam Albright\, Professor of LinguisticsEmily Richmond Pollock\, Associate Professor of Music.Leeland Fredlund\, Senior Research Support Associate – Compass Course \n\n\n\nCompass: An Experiment in Collaboration\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDescription\n\n\n\nLast spring\, the School of Humanities\, Arts\, and Social Sciences (SHASS) launched the pilot of its new multidisciplinary offering\, 21.01 Compass Course: Love\, Death\, and Taxes: How to Think–and Talk to Others–About Being Human. The course is designed to expose students with the tools of the humanities and social sciences to consider persistent moral and social questions central to the human experience\, ultimately guiding them in shaping the kind of humans they want to be and the society they wish to help create. Compass is the result of a multi-year collaboration involving over 30 faculty from 19 departments\, led by a core SHASS team and a student advisory board. Members of the Compass team\, including Lily Tsai\, Adam Albright\, Emily Richmond Pollock\, and Leela Fredlund\, will discuss the challenges and rewards of large collaborations. They will show how collaborative design resulted in a Compass pedagogy that highlights the unexpected results of multidisciplinary conversations and fosters faculty vulnerability through the teaching of unfamiliar topics\, transforming the class into a true collaboration between faculty and students. \n\n\n\nAll are welcome. Registration is required. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speakers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLily L. Tsai is the Director and Founder of the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)\, as well as the former Chair of the MIT Faculty. Her research focuses on accountability\, governance\, and political participation in developing contexts\, particularly in Asia and Africa. In 2014\, she founded MIT GOV/LAB\, a group of social and behavioral scientists and design researchers who develop and test innovations in citizen engagement and government responsiveness. By focusing on how and why citizens become active in engaging their governments\, Tsai aims to bridge researcher and practitioner communities by developing learning collaborations that can respond to governance challenges using empirical evidence in real time. Tsai has written two books\, When People Want Punishment: Retributive Justice and the Puzzle of Authoritarian Popularity\, and Accountability Without Democracy: Solidarity Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China\, as well as articles in The American Political Science Review\, The Journal of Politics\, Comparative Political Studies\, Political Behavior\, Comparative Politics\, and World Development. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmily Richmond Pollock is an Associate Professor of Music. Emily’s research focuses particularly on conservatism\, the historicization of modernist musical value\, operatic institutions\, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention. Emily joined Music and Theater Arts in 2012 and regularly teaches 21M.011 Introduction to Western Music and courses on opera\, the twentieth century\, and the symphonic repertoire\, as well as the Advanced Seminar for music majors. She is currently the music major advisor and has served in the past as a Burchard Faculty Fellow and as an advisor to first-years and music concentrators. She remains an active amateur oboist\, performing with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and the Mercury Orchestra. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdam Albright received his BA in linguistics from Cornell University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 2002. He was a Faculty Fellow at the University of California\, Santa Cruz from 2002-2004\, and is currently a Professor at MIT. His research interests include phonology\, morphology\, and learnability\, with an emphasis on using computational modeling and experimental techniques to investigate issues in phonological theory. Other interests include: Yiddish phonology and morphology; Lakhota phonology and morphology (and many other topics in Lakhota); and the proper treatment of historical change within Optimality Theory.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/compass-an-experiment-in-collaboration/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Featured-image.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260224T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260224T150000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20260112T195043Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260128T220511Z
UID:11434-1771941600-1771945200@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:What Happens in the Classroom is the Main Event
DESCRIPTION:Photo: MIT Image Library\n\n\n\nDr. Carlo Rotella\, Professor of English\, American Studies\, and Journalism at Boston College \n\n\n\nDescription\n\n\n\nWhat happens in the classroom is getting more\, not less\, cutting-edge all the time. Face-to-face teaching and learning become rarer and more valuable with each advance in educational technology. At the same time\, the higher-ed classroom is a black box in our culture. There’s no lack of strong opinions about what happens or doesn’t happen there\, but not enough practical discussion of the details. This talk is about those details\, especially the mechanics of classroom citizenship and the importance of building a community of inquiry. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\n\nDr. Carlo Rotella\, Professor of English\, American Studies\, and Journalism at Boston College \n\n\n\nCarlo Rotella is a professor of English\, American Studies\, and Journalism at Boston College. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine — most recently an essay on teaching English in the age of AI — and his work has also appeared in the New Yorker and Best American Essays. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship\, U.S. State Department grants to lecture in China and Bosnia\, and the Whiting Writers Award\, he has written books about the postindustrial city\, boxing\, blues\, and urban literature and film\, among other subjects. His latest book\, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics\, is about what happens in the classroom.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/what-happens-in-the-classroom-is-the-main-event/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Main-Event_featured-2.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260319T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260319T150000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20260224T182928Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260305T213957Z
UID:11647-1773928800-1773932400@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Leveraging the Power of Feedback for Student Motivation and Equity: An Evidence-Based and Practical Perspective
DESCRIPTION:By Olena/Adobe Stock\n\n\n\nDr. Alison Koenka\, Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Oklahoma \n\n\n\nDescription\n\n\n\nAcademic feedback–or messages provided to learners about their performance–is a powerful tool that instructors can leverage to boost student learning and motivation and to create more equitable college classrooms. High-quality feedback provides learners with valuable information about their current performance and guidance on how to improve. However\, researchers have found that many students fail to engage with feedback or respond negatively to it\, especially when it is negative or critical. Subsequently\, feedback can either support or hinder students’ learning and motivation\, as well as the overall rigor and equity of the classroom environment. \n\n\n\nDr. Alison Koenka will broaden our understanding of feedback\, presenting it as a multi-level phenomenon that goes beyond comments on graded assignments. She will share research on how different forms of feedback shape students’ motivation and learning\, and how students engage with feedback. The talk will conclude with actionable suggestions to enhance the effectiveness of feedback provided to students and to support students’ engagement with feedback. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\n\nDr. Alison Koenka is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Oklahoma. She holds a BA in Psychology from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Duke University. Koenka completed her postdoctoral training in Educational Psychology at The Ohio State University. Her research explores students’ motivation in STEM across secondary school and higher education settings. Dr. Koenka’s lab pursues these interests through two interrelated lines of inquiry. First\, she and her students investigate the motivational consequences of academic feedback\, including spontaneous interactions occurring between teachers and students\, grades and written feedback\, and implicit\, enduring feedback that often occurs at curriculum and/or policy levels (e.g.\, mathematics tracking). Second\, her lab conducts work that centers on the motivational experiences of youth from understudied populations. This research has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation\, the American Educational Research Association\, and the American Psychological Association. \n\n\n\nDr. Koenka was ranked as a top-producing early-career scholar in educational psychology journals from 2015-2021; she was also identified in 2024 as a Top-Cited Global Researcher by Stanford University and Elsevier Repository. Dr. Koenka is the 2025 recipient of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education Early Career Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring and is the 2024 recipient of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education Pre-Tenure Faculty Award.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/leveraging-the-power-of-feedback/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Event-image.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260428T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260428T140000
DTSTAMP:20260420T024320
CREATED:20260401T175117Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260413T132344Z
UID:11812-1777381200-1777384800@tll.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Panel Discussion– How AI is Changing Student Learning: Perspectives from MIT Students
DESCRIPTION:Photo: MIT Image Library\n\n\n\nModerated by Dr. Lourdes Alemán\, in collaboration with MIT Radius  \n\n\n\nDescription\n\n\n\nAs AI transforms our teaching and learning\, it is important to recognize that students’ experiences and attitudes towards AI are not homogeneous. In this panel of MIT students\, we will discuss how they use AI tools\, the impact of these tools on their learning\, and the ethical frameworks and concerns that they bring to their work. This conversation will allow educators to understand students’ perspectives on the motivations\, challenges\, and expectations shaping AI use today as they navigate these tools in real time. \n\n\n\nStudent Panel\n\n\n\n\nFelicity Zhou is a 3rd year student with a double major in mathematics with computer science (Course 18-C) and physics (Course 8)\n\n\n\nAnne Reidenbach is a 2nd year student with a major in artificial intelligence and decision making (Course 6-4)\n\n\n\nOlivia Honeycutt is a senior with a double major in computation and cognition (Course 6-9) and linguistics (Course 24-2)\n\n\n\nJohn Zhang is a graduate student in mechanical engineering\n\n\n\n\nAbout Radius\n\n\n\nRadius partners with students\, staff\, faculty\, and community members who desire to engage effectively in making the world a better place. Our programming sparks lively intellectual conversations\, with the commitment go deeper than merely the exchange of ideas. We strive to inspire people to look at the world in a new way\, to consider the deeper ethical implications of their actions\, and take action to promote justice\, dignity and peace.
URL:https://tll.mit.edu/event/how-ai-is-changingstudent-learning/
CATEGORIES:Speaker Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Student-learning-AI.jpg
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