Founder and Director
EngageFastLearning was founded by Dr. Nitin Jain in 2016. As a biochemical researcher and biology instructor for more than 15 years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he has always been interested in researching and using innovative active learning pedagogy methods in concert with cutting-edge educational technology to increase student engagement and performance in his classroom. In 2014, with initial funding and support from his university, he devised a personalized narrative-based approach which involved the use of multi-step process analogies to connect multiple actions of the scientific process conceptually to another process in the real world. In this approach, students play an active role by creating their own analogy storylines that incorporate concepts of a scientific process or evaluate peer-generated analogy narratives for better conceptual understanding and also remembering details of the process. He later extended this approach to narrative-based case studies which also allowed students to apply their conceptual learning to problem-solving.
He has been awarded several creative teaching grants and awards from his university for this approach. His current interests are in helping other instructors research and adopt evidence-based teaching practices that employ active learning methods, in particular that involve personalized student narratives. His narrative-based methods are growing in popularity, with instructors from several universities and other institutions adopting this narrative-based pedagogy.
