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Innovative technology and marketing strategies might be able to nudge students toward better decisions without limiting their freedom to choose. For example, it would be much easier for students to identify and compare relevant courses if academic catalogs were less like phone books and more like, say, Netflix. Then students could interactively search and browse on dimensions like course subject, timing, difficulty, prerequisites, major requirements or instructor ratings. Over time, students could be offered personalized suggestions based on their previous choices. New students could even be offered the equivalent of a prix fixe menu, offering a limited selection of prepackaged pathways while still allowing students to choose à la carte.

Bloomberg Businessweek asked deans at the top 30 U.S. business schools to name their favorite movies with a business theme or lesson and to explain their choices.

o culture is starved. Aesthetics are gone. Joy in learning is regarded as a bothersome distraction. "These kids don't have time for joy, or whim, or charm, or inquiry! Leave whim and happiness to the children of the privileged. Poor kids can't afford that luxury." Even good and idealistic inner-city principals tell me that they feel they have no choice.

Unfortunately, life is not multiple choice; it’s a story problem. If we want to prepare our students for the demands of college and the real world, we cannot afford to whittle away their knowledge to a, b, c, d, or e: all of the above. At the same time, our time as teachers is at a premium and very few of us can afford to spend hours grading essay tests.

Fortunately, the powers that be are aligning in the classroom teacher’s favor, and there are two great tools you can use to reduce your grading time.

So what does QuizStar have that other sites don’t? My favorite feature of QuizStar by far is the “choose all that apply” option. You can create a

Questions generated for research were based on the provocation and a focus question why do teens make stupid choices? As the questions generated for this task were generated by the students themselves they found them intrinsically motivating.

If you want students to have a voice and to have choice as well as developing a need to know about some area of content, then they should be generating their own questions.

But here's the irony. "Mary is more likely to convince John than professor Mazur in front of the class," Mazur says. "She's only recently learned it and still has some feeling for the conceptual difficulties that she has whereas professor Mazur learned [the idea] such a long time ago that he can no longer understand why somebody has difficulty grasping it." That's the irony of becoming an expert in your field, Mazur says. "It becomes not easier to teach, it becomes harder to teach because you're unaware of the conceptual difficulties of a beginning learner."

To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.

Mazur begins class by giving a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur's laptop. Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn't figure out what else to do. Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.