From Bubble Sheets to Online Portfolios

Beneath Semih Eser's placid exterior is a very focused, driven man. When it comes to his students, he refuses to take an easy path.

Dr. Eser learned to teach in the style of the "sage on the stage." His responsibility was to dispense knowledge, and his students' responsibility was record his every word, read the textbook, and cough up the right answers on a few multiple-choice exams during the semester. It's a teaching style that many students have come to expect, especially in a huge general education course.

But, conversations with students in his Energy and Environment course made Eser realize that while they may have memorized facts, many of them did not understand the basic concepts of energy use. Other students complained that they were confused by the multiple choice tests, despite having a firm grasp of the concepts.

Eser began to reconsider his teaching style. If he could get students actively involved in putting facts about energy use and fuels together, if they could arrange the ideas themselves, then they might build a deeper understanding of the material.

Eser could assign essays and short papers on various aspects of energy and fuels, and then he ask students to create another document to show how all of that information was related—a map of their understanding gained by serious thought, not acquired the day before his exam and forgotten the day after.

His plan would mean the end of feeding students' completed multiple-choice test sheets through an automatic scoring machine. It would require him to read thick stacks of papers and student portfolios—a major commitment for a busy man. It would also require him to redesign his existing courses to emphasize research and writing.

Eser took the plunge, and then went a step further. Not only did he switch his courses to an active-learning, project-oriented approach, he asked his students to submit all their work as web pages, so that the information would be available to the world.

While it makes a lot more work for him, he is very pleased with the results. He now has a better idea of what his students know, and he is convinced that his current students learn more than those he taught with his previous approach.

Semih Eser, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Energy and GeoEnvironmental Engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State. In addition to his teaching, Dr. Eser researches the the way that crude oil is carbonized, uses digital image analysis to describe carbon at the microscopic level, and prepares activated carbon from coal.