Group items tagged

Worth scan-reading at least.

Interesting piece by Keith Devlin about instructional videos and the research evidence showing that they tend to reinforce preconceptions even if the learner's preconceptions are completely at variance with the instructional content.

Thoughtful piece by Keith Devlin, who is no naysayer, having put a lot of effort into making and running MOOCs. Key excerpt: "Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.) But the production-line analogy has a major limitation. If a manufacturer finds the raw materials are inferior, she or he looks for other suppliers (or else uses the threat thereof to force the suppliers to up their game). But in education, you have to work with the supply you get -- and still produce a quality output. Indeed, that is the whole point of education."

Keith Devlin provides detailed insights into his increasing focus on "learning by evaluation" in the third run of his "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC, which starts on 2 September.

The usual thoughtful stuff from Keith Devlin about learning maths - in this case "Quantitative Reasoning" using MOOCs.

It gets a bit proselytising towards the end but the notion of evaluating proofs could generalise to evaluating other types of mathematical statement so, although we are not interested in mathematical proof in our course, the article could still have some relevance to us.

Interesting 1/10/2013 post from Keith Devlin about the production of technology based maths education.

Lots of food for thought in this retrospective summary of mainly MOOC and maths learning related articles from 2013 by Stanford U's Keith Devlin