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The article reports on a meta-analysis of 225 studies on the effectiveness of active learning techniques in undergraduate STEM classrooms. If anybody needs more evidence that techniques to actively engage students are more effective than the traditional passive lecture and listen classrooms, this report offers compelling numbers. Students in those traditional classes are found to be 1.5 times more likely to fail than those in classes with active learning components. Students in active learning classes earn grades that are, on average, 6% better than their counterparts in traditional classes.

Another article on Active Learning.

Lecture gets a bad rap for not being sufficiently active learning, but when is it actually the best tool for the job? The comments on this article also contain some good points.

A summary of faculty responses to a survey on lecture capture technology in face-to-face classrooms.

Interesting ideas here about the connective power of a recording of your voice for answering frequently asked questions or providing review copies of some of your short lectures.

A provocative essay with interesting ideas about the way we organize our time. Do current students have the active listening skills which the author seems to assume, and if not, are we doing enough to help them build those skills?

There's a fair amount of interest at Kenyon in moving lecture out of class time. This article addresses the fine points of what you do, then, with the freed-up class time. Includes a bibliography for further reading.

Patrick Jackson uses a "flipped classroom" model to force himself to not lecture, and instead focus intro-level students on the core skills of historical analysis. From the GLCA Center for Teaching and Learning.

Francis Su delivered this address as the MAA Haimo Teaching Award Lecture. In it, he talks about the role which grace plays in teaching.

Here are 6 ways faculty are using it to make their courses more engaging, flexible, and imaginative.

This is a pretty good online course for introducing academics to relevant issues in copyright law. The lectures are given by experts in the field, and are appropriately accessible and detailed. It's now available "on demand"; I'm curious to see how people experience that differently than the earlier synchronous (multi-week) iteration.

Vassar has invigorated its common reading program for first-year students by integrating video mini-lectures and Moodle discussion forums. A more active program seems to be helping the first-year cohort form and introduce the campus culture before students move in.

This Chronicle blogger concedes that "modularity" will not work at residential colleges -- at least not for all courses. Personally I think this reductionist trend is going too far. Students choose a major discipline. Students (often) choose a sub-discipline. Students choose which courses to take among all the possibilities. Students choose from among professors teaching those courses. The post takes this down to the level of the 10-minute video (or lecture). Really? What can one learn in ten minutes that stands alone so much that ALL the related knowledge can be ignored. Here's an example. A student watches a 10-minute video on coral reefs and learns that reefs are in danger due to rising ocean temperatures. Fine. But what is the reason? Does the threat to coral stem from the fact that they build their skeletons out of calcium carbonate? From the fact that modern corals are aragonitic and not calcitic? Does the symbiotic nature of corals and zooxanthellic algae play a role? Is there something else involved here? A combination of factors? Factoids? Do we really want our future generations making decisions about important matters based on what they remember from a 10-minute lecture or video?

An interesting description of the "peer instruction" model used to achieve active learning in large lecture classes by Eric Mazur.

We're seeing increasing interest in video communication for class purposes, from bringing in guest lecturers or co-teachers, to connecting Kenyon students with other students around the globe, to coping with weather or illness. This is a good 2-page rundown of the idea from EDUCAUSE.

The title of this one pretty much sums up the content completely. There is a link to some good vs. bad examples of PowerPoint slides, but they are pretty self-evident. The guidelines discussed in this article are worth exploring even if you are not developing a MOOC or a smaller online course -- for example, if you just want to flip a class or two.

Do bullet points oversimplify the nuanced arguments in a lecture? I'm not prepared to give an unequivocal "yes" like this author, but I think questioning your PowerPoint style (and perhaps your students' lecture-attending style) is a good exercise.

Universal design for learning ultimately saves labor, and benefits all learners in the class. "So if I take a little more time and effort to make my writing large, legible, and organized on the white board, I am going to help the student with visual impairments - but I'm also going to help everyone in the room take better notes on our discussion. If I take the time to create slides with a minimal amount of text or images - and then encourage students to take their own notes by filling in the examples and ideas from the lecture or discussion - I'm helping everyone push beyond simply copying down lecture notes and regurgitating the course content."

Looks like a great template schedule for courses which want to build public websites.

The MOOC conversation is dominated by examples of digitizing the large lecture hall. This is a deviation from the historical roots of the MOOC, and in this Chronicle article a very different kind of open educational activity is proposed.

A review of recent papers on the effectiveness of video lectures as supplemental material in a traditional class. From the article: "I think it suggests that screencasts, when done well and deployed properly, help all students - they certainly don't hurt - and they help most those students who need the most help."