鈥淭his Is Going to Be Big,鈥 proclaimed Doug McKee鈥檚 Teach Better on Feb. 13.
The Cornell economics department had just received an Active Learning Initiative (ALI) grant to transform its entire undergraduate core curriculum over the next five years. It was the culmination of eight months of planning, writing and consensus-building in the department that started before McKee arrived at Cornell last fall. McKee, a senior lecturer, is the ALI project lead in economics.
鈥淚鈥檝e taken it on as my career goal to help change how economics is taught across the field,鈥 says McKee. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not often you actually get your dream job, and I couldn鈥檛 be more excited. One person can鈥檛 do it all, but one person can push a rock over the edge.鈥
Originally, McKee鈥檚 career focused on research with little teaching, but it didn鈥檛 feel like the right match to him. As a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, he taught his first class and realized how much he loved it. But, he said, 鈥淲e can do so much better at getting students to actually learn.鈥 He founded his Teach Better blog in 2014 to share his thoughts on teaching and the education system in general. (Follow his blog on twitter at @TeachBetterCo, subscribe to the RSS feed or .)
McKee struck up a friendship with Edward O鈥橬eill at the Yale equivalent of Cornell鈥檚 Center for Teaching Innovation, and it occurred to him that their frequent conversations about teaching were 鈥渢he podcast I always wanted to listen to but could never find.鈥 Between McKee鈥檚 undergraduate degree in computer science (his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, is in economics) and O鈥橬eill鈥檚 audio production experience and doctorate from the UCLA film school, they had all the requisite skills to create their own podcast.
This August, they published their 61st episode of the , each of which gets between 1,000 to 3,000 downloads. About 50 percent of their recent guests are from Cornell, many recommended by students and the Center for Teaching Innovation. The interviews range from 鈥,鈥 associate professor and chair of music, to 鈥,鈥 the Stephen H. Weiss Provost鈥檚 Teaching Fellow and director of the Game Design Initiative in the Department of Computer Science. The most popular episode is 鈥,鈥 the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics. McKee says he loves doing the interviews and gaining different perspectives; the interview with White, for example, 鈥渟tretched my brain about what鈥檚 possible in the classroom.鈥
This summer, McKee and O鈥橬eill shook things up a bit on the podcast by organizing a series of episodes around categories of educational technology, like 鈥溾 and 鈥溾 and including three to four experts per episode, instead of just one.
Many of the podcast guests emphasize that while they want students to learn facts, a bigger goal is for them to learn to think like someone in their discipline: to think like an economist or historian or philosopher. Says McKee: 鈥淭hat requires deep learning, and there is a large body of research that active methods are more effective at getting students to learn at that level than passive lecturing. We鈥檙e scholars, so we believe research. If the research says we should teach this way, then I think we should.鈥
More News from A&S
