I have the mixed fortune of living in a city that, as of this writing, had the highest total snowfall in the United States this year (woohoo Worcester, Massachusetts!). As a skier, I welcome snow; as a homeowner, I have been both lamenting the massive drifts blocking the streets and driveways of our city and cringing at the thought of the water that will inundate our basements in the coming thaw.
In anticipation of that flood, I recently pulled a trunk of old books and papers out of the most vulnerable part of my basement, only to discover a lost trove of documents from my college years. I saved much more from my undergraduate and graduate courses than I realized: notebooks, handouts, papers I wrote, and even some syllabi.
By James M. Lang
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http://chronicle.com
Monday, March 30, 2015
The 3 Essential Functions of Your Syllabus, Part 1
Our campus teaching center recently invited a brave group of student tutors to share their views on effective teaching with our faculty. The four tutors reported what they had heard from students about course designs and teaching practices that seemed to help, and ones that seemed to interfere with learning. Three recurrent themes in the tutors’ remarks caught my attention.
First, they suggested that students needed more help in seeing the large organizational sweep of a course. Undergraduates who came to the tutoring center often had no idea how the first week of the semester in a class connected to the last, or even how different units related to one another. For many students, courses appear less as logical progressions than as, to quote the American writer Elbert Hubbard, "one damn thing after another." So course designs that might seem so clear and elegant to us as faculty members, apparently, do not always appear so lucid to our students.
By James M. Lang
Read more.
http://chronicle.com
First, they suggested that students needed more help in seeing the large organizational sweep of a course. Undergraduates who came to the tutoring center often had no idea how the first week of the semester in a class connected to the last, or even how different units related to one another. For many students, courses appear less as logical progressions than as, to quote the American writer Elbert Hubbard, "one damn thing after another." So course designs that might seem so clear and elegant to us as faculty members, apparently, do not always appear so lucid to our students.
By James M. Lang
Read more.
http://chronicle.com
Thursday, March 26, 2015
MOOCs for Wisconsin and the World
Imagine a massive open online course (MOOC) that doesn't feel so massive; one that's intimately tied to a region, with opportunities for meaningful face-to-face encounters in community settings. The University of Wisconsin–Madison will offer six such courses in its latest round of massive open online courses for 2015–16. One course will invite those interested in climate change to attend discussions throughout Wisconsin, thanks to partnerships with 21 public libraries. Another course, focused on hunting and conservation, features an event with hunters and chefs in the southern Wisconsin city of Baraboo.
UW–Madison began its experiment with massive open online courses in 2013. Hosted on Coursera, the four courses in our first phase reached about 135,000 learners from 141 countries and all 50 states.1 Despite reservations about MOOCs in academic circles,2 university leaders believe these courses have a part to play in our future, tying them to a larger push for institutional change called Educational Innovation: an attempt to prepare students and communities for the 21st century. In launching a second phase of MOOCs, we're thinking more carefully about our audiences so we can use the platform to engage with people in both Wisconsin and the world.
By Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Jeffrey Russell, Linda A. Jorn, and Joshua Morrill
Read more.
http://www.educause.edu/
UW–Madison began its experiment with massive open online courses in 2013. Hosted on Coursera, the four courses in our first phase reached about 135,000 learners from 141 countries and all 50 states.1 Despite reservations about MOOCs in academic circles,2 university leaders believe these courses have a part to play in our future, tying them to a larger push for institutional change called Educational Innovation: an attempt to prepare students and communities for the 21st century. In launching a second phase of MOOCs, we're thinking more carefully about our audiences so we can use the platform to engage with people in both Wisconsin and the world.
By Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Jeffrey Russell, Linda A. Jorn, and Joshua Morrill
Read more.
http://www.educause.edu/
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Online or In-Person? One College Lets Students Switch Back and Forth
When you register for a course, you often have a choice: in-person or online. But at Peirce College, you don’t have to pick one or the other. All students will soon get access to both formats in the same course.
Peirce, a college in Philadelphia that caters specifically to adult learners, plans to allow its students to switch back and forth between attending class in person or online, based on which is more convenient for them on a given week. The flexible delivery model will be offered in certain programs this fall and it will be extended to the college’s entire curriculum by September of 2016. The initiative is part of the college’s 2015-2018 strategic plan.
By Casey Fabris
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus
Peirce, a college in Philadelphia that caters specifically to adult learners, plans to allow its students to switch back and forth between attending class in person or online, based on which is more convenient for them on a given week. The flexible delivery model will be offered in certain programs this fall and it will be extended to the college’s entire curriculum by September of 2016. The initiative is part of the college’s 2015-2018 strategic plan.
By Casey Fabris
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Engaging Faculty in Online Education
The initial resistance to online learning by many institutional leaders has given way to urgency about engaging faculty in online instruction. Even at traditional residential universities and colleges with well-established excellence in seminar, lecture, and lab instruction, experimentation with online learning is rampant as institutions rush to adopt educational technology and online pedagogy. Administrators may urge action, and some faculty view exploring online teaching and learning as an inviting and even invigorating challenge, but others still decline to participate. Many faculty have yet to use technology in their instruction — even something as basic as the campus learning management system — much less experiment with flipped or hybrid classes. This leaves many IT, ed tech, and online learning professionals challenged to move their institutions and faculty online and into the 21st century of education.
By Karen H. Sibley and Ren Whitaker
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By Karen H. Sibley and Ren Whitaker
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Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Videos Find Their Place In and Out of the Classroom
Among today’s students, videos as an educational tool are as expected as textbooks.
A new study has found that 68 percent of students watch videos in class, and 79 percent watch them on their own time, outside of class, to assist in their learning.
By Casey Fabris
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/
A new study has found that 68 percent of students watch videos in class, and 79 percent watch them on their own time, outside of class, to assist in their learning.
By Casey Fabris
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree
Yale University is creating a master’s program that will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray into “blended” learning.
The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.
By Steve Kolowich
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus
The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.
By Steve Kolowich
Read more.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus
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