Overview
The Freeform classroom model highly emphasizes interactive and open-ended discussions, ample problem examples, demonstrations, and case studies paralleling real-world events. This guide collects reflections and experiences from instructors who adopted Freeform. Unless specified otherwise, all quotes are from instructors adopting Freeform for the first time.
Topics are organized as below:
What did instructors say
“There’s really nothing you have to do for this course. I mean you just have to know what you want to teach, and all the material is there. You just have to prepare to take it with you. It’s amazing. There’s nothing to really think about. It’s so well thought.”
“I feel that I have the control of the course in terms of the learning curve of the students. Usually the first weeks, they have many problems with basic concepts from the statics course. When we arrived to the middle of the semester, they are engaged more with the basic concepts and their performance is going better and better.”
“One student lamented, ‘The structure of this textbook is the only time I actually learn in class. I go to my other classes and I don’t actually learn,’ and they probably do, but it doesn’t feel like they’re learning because they’re not seeing how to do problems.”
“Comparing with another sections from different faculty members. This course, it seems to have better performance than the other sections that they are not using Freeform approach.”
“Now I am promoting more active and collaborative learning, and reinforcing basic concepts where I found weakness. Also I am discussing with other faculty from Static and Solid Mechanics courses about students performance, new materials, types of problems to be solved in class, and so on.”
To learn more about what Freeform is, please visit this page.
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