Most -- if not all -- of the important skills in our life are acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Yet we continue to teach using lectures where students passively take down information. Instead, we should really focus on the assimilation of that information and shift the focus from teaching to helping students learn. Over the past 20 years, instructors world-wide have begun to adopt Peer Instruction to get students to think in class. With the advent of new technology the process can be significantly improved. A new data-analytics driven audience response system does away with multiple choice questions and helps instructors design better questions, manage time and process flow, and optimize the discussions in the classroom.

Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1990, he began developing Peer Instruction, an active learning method, and he is the author of Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1997), a book that explains how to teach large lecture classes interactively. In 2011, he founded Learning Catalytics, a company that uses data analytics to improve learning in the classroom.

The Student Learning and Analytics at Michigan (SLAM) Seminar series features both U-M faculty and visitors from other campuses, focusing on the use of data about students, courses and academic programs -- for the purposes of improving teaching and learning. For more information about learning analytics at U-M and to view videos and slides from past SLAM presentations, click here.