Center for Innovative Pedagogy

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 worthwhile interview about the University of Mary Washington program to offer every student and professor their own domain name and a significant amount of control over which web publishing platforms they use. I find the discussions about privacy vs. publicy in a networked society to be the intellectual meat of the piece - the technology issues, while complex, are also just logistics to be solved or worked around.

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.

News article about an online calculus class to be offered this summer by Macalester and St. Olaf.

Fun profile of a Middlebury history professor making extensive use of GIS.

This essay specifically discusses the MOOC concept in the context of a small liberal arts college. I have personally heard many of the points raised in this essay in conversations here on the Kenyon campus.

If any liberal arts college was likely to step into the MOOC world, it would be one offering cross-listed courses with MIT, one of the founders of the MOOC provider EdX. This will be one to keep an eye on for small, elite liberal arts colleges like Kenyon. 

"Over-committed" is a word which frequently comes up when talking about today's students. Perhaps this would be a helpful tool in getting students to think about their schedules.

We had a conversation in a staff meeting recently about "contemplative pedagogy"; this conversation from Xavier University of Louisiana's podcast is a good introduction. The way that contemplation plays into theory formation and the understanding of complex models is particularly interesting.

A worthwhile read as we near course evaluation time. Especially with our online system's new ability for faculty to write their own questions, it might be worthwhile to ask students if the question they answered is the question you meant to ask!

The productive (and appropriate) use of data about student use of online resources is going to be an interesting part of teaching in the future, and a difficult one.

This is a question we need to start asking up-front. When a textbook vendor calls, ask about accessible materials. When you see a documentary, ask if it's closed-captioned. When we think about new technologies, ask about screen readers and other accessibility tools. Better still, ask vendors (and colleagues) what accommodations they'd make to get all students an equivalent educational experience.

One thing I learned as Helpline manager is that the stereotype that today's students are "good with computers" is a gross generalization. Students (and most people) are good at _doing some things_ with computers. If we're asking them to use an unfamiliar system, especially for a complex task, it would be time well spent both to introduce them to the tool and check in on how they used it.

Clay Shirkey, author of "Here Comes Everybody," examines the challenge posed to U.S. higher education by massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Shirkey is the author of "Here Comes Everybody," a book he says is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures." In this article, he describes the same dynamic at work in the disruptive potential of MOOCs to all but the most elite institutions of higher education in America. 

Academic publishing house John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has teamed up with TED to produce instructor material for a recently launched series of videos called the "TED Studies." The link takes you to a press announcement from Wiley, in which there is a link to the first two inaugural courses. One of these is in psychology, the other is in statistics. The instructor material is online in these first two cases, but I cannot see where Wiley precludes potential print material in the future. I also cannot find the TED Studies area of the TED web pages, and I am trying to discover the difference between TED Studies and the previously announced TED-Ed initiative. I will update this comment when I can find more information.

Essay by a professor at Vanderbilt who adapted his face-to-face classes to take advantage of MOOCs on the same subject. He calls this making his course a "wrapper", I've called it "using the MOOC as a textbook." See in particular the last paragraph, regarding the "scholarly-like community with my fellow educators."

The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. However, while changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. These topics include the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use (digital and image "literacies").

"A microlecture is a short recorded audio or video presentation on a single, tightly defined topic." ELI wraps up some of the important points to when considering this approach to a "blended" or "flipped" classroom.

This is about as honest an assessment of MOOCs as I've seen. Read between the lines and you'll see the promise and potential failings of this grand educational experiment.

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.