In the next academic year, McMaster’s Introduction to Psychology course will mark a significant milestone: 100,000 students will have taken the course since Joe Kim began teaching it over 20 years ago.
How Kim and his fellow instructors have been able to reach this many students in that time was the subject of his keynote speech at this year’s conference hosted by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) in downtown Hamilton.
The annual conference, hosted this year by McMaster and Mohawk College, brings together educators, administrators and students from across disciplines to explore innovative and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning through workshops, presentations, and meetings.
Kim, a professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour and principal instructor for the university’s introductory psych program, attributes the volume of students over the past two decades to the course’s innovative blended learning model, which involves highly interactive online modules and immersive tutorials and lectures with an emphasis on building community.
“Even though this is the largest course on campus, students feel like they are part of something special, a community,” said Kim to attendees Wednesday morning.
The program is successful, with an average 95-per-cent attendance rate across the semester, because of the research that has gone into designing it and because students are encouraged to be active partners in the learning process.
“Students come into university with good intentions, but sometimes they get really caught up with grades. So I ask my students on the very first day of class, ‘I want you to think back to a moment when you didn’t even care about grades. You just want to understand how the world works.’ ”
That curiosity, Kim said, is something he sees in his young daughter, who conducted an experiment with him to independently confirm whether the light in a refrigerator turns off when the door is closed.
It’s information that anyone can get through Google or ChatGPT, but Kim said his daughter would not have been satisfied without finding out the answer on her own. She ended up putting his phone in the fridge and recording a video of what happens when they shut the door.
“The truth that I try to instill to my students is that I don’t want them to think of their brain as just something to fill by ingesting information. They have to be an active partner to build and make connections to what they already know to make that information stick.”
Students as active partners
Students who attended the STLHE conference corroborated Kim’s hypothesis about being actively involved in their own education. Will Zhang, an Honours Health Sciences Program student, said students hold valuable perspectives about how knowledge is delivered and received in postsecondary classrooms.
“When students actively participate in teaching and course design, we advocate for student priorities to shape how educational practices are implemented,” said Zhang.
Fourth-year Honours Health Sciences Program student Rebecca Bekele agreed. Students need to be involved in discussions about teaching and learning, especially when it comes to improving educational accessibility and affordability, she said.
“Through my work on the McMaster Textbook Affordability Survey, I’ve seen how valuable it is to trust students as genuine partners in research and institutional initiatives,” said Bekele.
“Having the opportunity to help shape the survey, analyze the findings, and share recommendations at events like the STLHE Conference has shown me that student perspectives can play an important role in creating positive change when we’re given the opportunity.”
Bekele and Zhang’s enthusiasm for being partners in the educational process reflects what Kim Dej, vice-provost of Teaching and Learning, has seen during strategic development guiding teaching and learning at McMaster in recent years.
“Our students not only seek to understand how the world works, but also seek to effect the change necessary to create a world that is just and caring,” said Dej.
From left, Darren Bridgewater, Aftab Taiyab, Rishi Thangarajah, Pareesa Ali, Nazia Pathan, and Mubariz Maqsood. They are part of the award-winning team behind Demystifying Medicine, an innovative approach to medical knowledge translation that makes complex medical concepts more accessible and engaging for learners and the broader community. (Lisa Polewski, McMaster University)
Helping students ‘escape that cave’
The four-day STLHE conference also recognized outstanding student-centred teaching and learning initiatives through the 2026 D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning.
Darren Bridgewater, associate professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, and one of this year’s award recipients for his work on the educational YouTube series Demystifying Medicine, said students learn best when they are actively engaged in collaborating and working through real-world problems that are relevant to themselves and others.
“Students are positioned not as passive recipients of information, but as contributors to knowledge,” said Bridgewater. “They take responsibility for making complex ideas understandable, relatable and actionable for a global community. In doing so, they develop essential skills in critical thinking, knowledge translation, communication, collaboration, creativity, leadership and empathy; skills that are applicable to any career beyond university.”
During his keynote, Kim encouraged his fellow educators to nurture that mindset of active contribution in their students, even though it might feel easier to rely on answers from AI and ChatGPT. He likened extensive use of those tools to the ancient allegory of the cave,where people are trapped in the cave, and everything they know about the world is based on the shadows they see on the walls.
“That’s all that they know. And they believe that’s all that the world is,” Kim said. “I know a lot of students who just blindly accept what ChatGPT and AI accept, and that’s so disappointing. That shows such a lack of intellectual curiosity.”
“I think if we’re doing our teaching right, we’re helping them to escape that cave so that they can become a lifelong learner that is a human being that reasons, experiences, and remains absolutely curious about the world.”