Measuring Active Learning with Melinda Owens

Wouldn't it be interesting to see an analysis of how much time you spent on active learning, right after class ended? DART is a tool created by a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of education researchers. DART stands for Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching. All you have to do is record your class session with your phone and upload the recording to the DART website. DART’s machine learning algorithms will then analyze that audio and let you know how much of your class time was spent on lecturing versus active learning.

I first heard about DART a few years ago, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about it ever since. I reached out to Melinda Owens, assistant teaching professor in neurobiology at the University of California San Diego and one of the lead developers for DART, and she was excited to talk with me about DART. Melinda shares a bit about her journey into education research, the origins of DART, and how college faculty can use DART to better understand and improve their own teaching.

Episode Resources:

Melinda Owens’ faculty page, https://biology.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/mtowens.html 

DART website, https://sepaldart.herokuapp.com/ 

“Classroom sound be used to classify teaching practices in college science courses,” Melinda Owens et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:12, https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1618693114


Music:

"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay

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