Award-winning student engagement platform Nearpod, which provides ready-to-run interactive lessons for K-12 teachers, is redesigning its flagship service for use in higher education by launching Nearpod for Higher Education to turn adult learners into active learners.
Founded in 2012, Nearpod empowers educators to create learning experiences that engage and inspire millions of students around the world. The company’s ‘student engagement’ system for K-12 lets teachers create, download and teach interactive lessons that include quizzes, polls, open-ended questions, digital collaboration and 3D objects. Nearpod provides 7,000+ ready-to-run, customizable lessons built in partnership with renowned publishers like PhET and ReadWorks.
With Nearpod’s software, the educator enters a lesson, provides a code to the students, and the lesson is synced to all the devices in the classroom, allowing students to participate with fun and interactive activities. The teacher can also make lessons available to students outside of group classroom delivery. Nearpod’s virtual reality module also allows educators to immerse students into virtual field trips.
Nearpod for Higher Education is being pegged as an active learning platform for face-to-face and online courses. The company includes some of the same features that it uses in the K-12 platform such as polling and quizzes for higher education as well. The lessons can be delivered in real time or asynchronously.
Speaking on the launch of Nearpod for Higher Education, Felipe Sommer, CEO and co-founder of Nearpod, said in a blog post,
“We’re excited to launch Nearpod for Higher Education and help get college students engaged and actively learning – while also ensuring that professors can easily connect with their students. We’re applying some of the same strategies we use in our K-12 platform for higher education, and we look forward to seeing how professors bring even more life to their lessons and lectures.”
Higher education space is different from that of K-12 classrooms. It is more diverse plus many learners are now non-traditional students – such as part-time learners, returning service members, and adults returning to school. It thus poses some unique engagement challenges for the instructors. With Nearpod, every learner can feel empowered to participate and feel connected to the classroom, no matter where they are learning from. By making use of Nearpod’s interactive lesson and formative assessment tools, instructors, who are often subject-matter experts with their own content, can now be able to easily bring active learning techniques, structure, and proven teaching methods to their existing material.
Commenting further on Nearpod for Higher Education, Felipe Sommer added in the same post saying:
“As we gather feedback from Nearpod’s higher education early adopters – like Illinois State and Saint Xavier University – we’ll keep evolving the platform to meet higher education needs. From content creation to tailored features, we can’t wait to explore this market deeper and continue building out programs that suit the needs of all higher learning institutions and their learners.”
The company said that after initial pilots with 200 top institutions, it is seeing great success, particularly in schools of Health Sciences, Business, Law, and Education.
