The expected participants are university instructors with some prior familiarity with ICAP. Attending Dr. Chi’s talk would provide sufficient familiarity, as would reading her ICAP papers.

The purpose of the workshop is to increase participants’ expertise in applying ICAP to upgrade learning activities. Although one of ICAP’s virtues is its simplicity, there are still many potential misconceptions, edge cases and nuances when applying it to specific learning activities. Moreover, ICAP typically illustrates a mode with simple examples, whereas authentic classroom activities, such as solving problems, often involve many factors that make them more difficult to classify into an ICAP mode. The difficulty of classifying some classroom activities is that many factors may come into play, and many of these factors can affect ICAP in ways that are not relevant or predicted by ICAP. For example, a student’s prior knowledge can affect the mode of a problem.

The workshop will have four phases. During the first phase of the workshop, the leader will present examples and non-examples of upgrades. For each one, participants will first vote on whether the pair of learning activities is an ICAP upgrade or not. Next, participants will discuss and defend their votes. Finally, the instructor will join the discussion.

During the second phase, the instructor will ask if any participants have already designed and implemented an upgrade. One or two such participants will be asked to briefly explain their upgrade to everyone, and feedback will be discussed.

During the third phase, participants will work individually on upgrading a learning activity that they have brought to the workshop. The instructor will circulate, answering questions while everyone is working.

During the fourth phase, selected participants will present the upgrade that they have designed, and answer questions from the participants. The instructor will select upgrades that are interesting and may provoke discussion.

Through these four phases, the participants should not only learn how to upgrade learning activities in their own subject matter, but also learn how others have upgraded their learning activities in different subject matters.