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The rapid increase in the availability of high-bandwidth Internet service, coupled with a wide array of interactive software, has touched off a new wave of experimentation in education.

Dr. Widom said she had recorded her video lectures during the summer and would use classroom sessions to work with smaller groups of students on projects that might be competitive and to bring in people from the industry to give special lectures. Unlike the A.I. course, this one will compare online students with one another and not with the Stanford students.

In place of office hours, they will use the Google moderator service, software that will allow students to vote on the best questions for the professors to respond to in an online chat and possibly video format. They are considering ways to personalize the exams to minimize cheating.

Results suggest that there is no significant difference in the Amazon rankings. This suggests that releasing academic books on open access does not lessen printed book sales online in comparison with traditional university presses using Amazon.com and Amazon.ca rankings. On the other hand, AUPress, because it is open access and publicly available at no cost, can boast of having a significantly larger readership for its books. The traditional university presses, because of their cost, print-only format, and other proprietary limitations are not readily available and therefore not accessible to many potential readers.

if you’re publishing, think beyond the financial impact of a book. Consider peripheral factors such as extending the reach of your work and non-monetary reward factors such as connecting with colleagues in emerging economies, speaking invitations, collaboration opportunities, etc.

Teachers who respect students Understand the power of beliefs in shaping their practice. They rid themselves of any covert persuasion they may have that kids who are like them in race, economic status, language, beliefs, or motivation are somehow better or smarter than those who are unlike them. Believe their work can make previously unimpressive students shine—and can raise the ceilings of possibility for impressive students. Teach students how to grow academically and personally. Enlist students' partnership in creating a classroom that dignifies each person within it.

Teachers who respect students choose their words and tone carefully. They consciously Listen to students—and hear them. Use positive humor, not sarcasm. Provide corrective feedback in ways that foster student effort. Acknowledge student growth. Use their words to defuse difficult situations.

The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them. In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive:

Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall. Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own. 

In addition to exploring their diverse backgrounds, students will discuss the language challenges graduates face as many work overseas, Hampton said. "They're going to be living in a multilingual context, and that's a really interesting thing for them to think about," he said.

The voice samples will be attached anonymously to an interactive world map so other participants can hear them, and each student will be matched through a voice recognition program with five others who have similar pronunciations, Johnson said.

With about 30% of incoming UC Berkeley students reporting that English was not their first language, exploring that linguistic diversity is a good way to help students feel comfortable at such a large school, faculty organizers said.