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Home/ Diigo In Education/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Maureen Greenbaum

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Maureen Greenbaum

Maureen Greenbaum

15 Surprising Discoveries About Learning - InformED : - 59 views

  • Conscientiousness and Openness have the biggest influence on academic success.
  • people learn better when using multiple, short training episodes rather than one extended session
  • participants who held jobs with higher levels of complexity with data and people, such as management and teaching, had better scores on memory and thinking tests
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  • Students who walked in another experiment doubled their number of novel responses compared with when they were sitting.
  • Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar,
  • . You can improve your learning by expecting to share it with others.
  • Findings suggest that simply telling learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a test.
Maureen Greenbaum

'Interactive Learning Spaces' at the center of Ball State U.'s faculty development prog... - 29 views

  • The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing
  • university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.
  • How do we set ourselves apart? In our case, by the development of these interactive learning space classrooms, we are demonstrating to everyone that we are committed to the concept of faculty development.”
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  • Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.
  • “We actually found a fairly moderate to strong correlation between what they think of these areas and if they think they have the ability to get a higher grade -- or their motivation to attend class and also their engagement in class,”
  • The company has surveyed hundreds of students and faculty members at the universities it has worked with, and says it has found a statistically significant correlation between classroom configuration and student engagement. The survey doesn't include any academic results.
  • researchers found at-risk students who took the course in classrooms that promoted active learning (which included some rooms other than the renovated ones) were 2.8 times more likely to succeed -- that is, to earn a grade higher than a D -- than students in traditional classrooms.
  • “Perception-wise, students are telling us ‘I can do better when I’m in these spaces,’ ” Jones said. “Maybe that’s enough of a win?”
Maureen Greenbaum

Houston Strategies: The future of education is here, it's just not evenly distributed - 3 views

  • lots of student agency and teachers who've switched from lecturing to mentoring and guiding
  • approach is *far* more engaging for the kids, and therefore they learn so much more and faster.
  •  Acton's kids are testing 5+ years ahead of grade level (!),
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  • they are too locked into the rigid, sequential, single classroom/teacher/subject model, both in their mindset and their physical buildings.
Maureen Greenbaum

The role of communities of practice in a digital age - 36 views

  • Wenger argues that there are three crucial characteristics of a community of practice: domain: a common interest that connects and holds together the community community: a community is bound by the shared activities they pursue (for example, meetings, discussions) around their common domain practice: members of a community of practice are practitioners; what they do informs their participation in the community; and what they learn from the community affects what they do.
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Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Maureen Greenbaum

What happens when 5th graders run the classroom: A SOLE in action | TED Blog - 70 views

  • teaching a child to how to think critically is the gift that keeps on giving.
Maureen Greenbaum

Can Facebook Make Better Students? -- Campus Technology - 1 views

  • create a sense of connectedness that promotes active learning.
  • active learning — which involves reflection and affective dimensions of learning — can promote, among other things, improved academic performance
Maureen Greenbaum

Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2013 | The Sloan Consortium - 34 views

  • 7.1 million of higher education students are taking at least one online course. The 6.1 % growth rate represents over 400,000 additional students taking at least one online course. The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those as in face-to-face instruction, grew from 57% in 2003 to 74% in 2013. The number of students taking at least one online course continued to grow at a rate far in excess of overall enrollments, but the rate was the lowest in a decade.
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    Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education: Download 45 page pdf
Maureen Greenbaum

Q&A with Freeman Hrabowski: UMBC carving a singular niche in cyber, STEM education - Ba... - 11 views

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    broader a person's education, the stronger a person's thinking skills and ability to solve problems
Maureen Greenbaum

SNHU: How Paul LeBlanc's tiny school has become a giant of higher education. - 1 views

  • Students are referred to as “customers.”
  • t deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.
  • “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”
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  • tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt
  • school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program
  • vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.
  • “College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience
  • low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population.
  • online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.
  • An instructor’s main job is to swoop in when a student is in trouble. Often, they don’t pick up the warning signs themselves. Instead, SNHU’s predictive analytics platform plays watchdog, sending up a red flag to an instructor when a student hasn’t logged on recently or has spent too much time on an assignment
  • highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors
  •  
    The Amazon of Higher Education- How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.
Maureen Greenbaum

Colleges Can Still Save Themselves. Here's How. - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 37 views

  • disruption that technology has inflicted on the retail sector over the past decade is often used to illustrate what is about to happen in higher education.
  • institutions rarely introduce the sometimes radical changes they need to make, because one group of constituents believes the sky will fall tomorrow anyway, while others refuse to acknowledge that this time is different.
  • question is whether institutions will quicken their pace of change to lower their costs and better serve the changing educational needs of students and the global economy.
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  • moving away from a one-size-fits-all system, in which students largely follow the same calendar and curriculum on their way to collecting 120 credits for a bachelor's degree
  • More of the decisions colleges make about their direction must be rooted in data.
  • Now the data exist to track students, the classes they took, how they performed, and their outcomes after graduation—all of which can inform decisions.
Maureen Greenbaum

Great Teachers Don't Teach | Edutopia - 13 views

  • great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way.
  • great teacher will devise a way to give the students an urgent reason to learn skills or knowledge and then let them show they have learned it by what they can do. This is called project-based learning.
  • Students learn best when they are in control of their learning
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  • great teacher devises learning experiences that force all the students to be engaged much like being in the deep end of the swimming pool. Then the lesson on arm and leg strokes becomes relevant. To learn, the students must do something. We call this performance-based learning.
  • Socrates had it right when he only answered a question with more questions and look what he produced -- some of the greatest minds that ever lived. We call this the Socratic method.
  • Yet what do we find in every public school and university? Teachers talking, talking and talking while students listen, daydream and doze. We call this lecture.
Maureen Greenbaum

Calls from Washington for streamlined regulation and emerging models | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • more of online “innovations” like competency-based education.
  • reauthorization of the Higher Education Act might shake out.
  • flow of federal financial aid to a wide range of course providers, some of which look nothing like colleges.
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  • give state regulators a new option to either act as accreditors or create their own accreditation systems.
  • “States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus.”
  • any new money for those emerging models would likely come out of the coffers of traditional colleges.
  • cut back on red tape that prevents colleges from experimenting with ways to cut prices and boost student learning.
  • decentralized, more streamlined form of accreditation.
  • regional accreditors are doing a fairly good job. They are under enormous pressure to keep “bad actors” at bay while also encouraging experimentation. And he said accreditors usually get it right.
  • Andrew Kelly, however, likes Lee’s idea. Kelly, who is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform, said it would create a credible alternative to the existing accreditation system, which the bill would leave intact.
  • eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority
  • “Accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing and even competency-based tests,”
  • “The gateway to education reform is education oversight reform,”
  • broad, bipartisan agreement that federal aid policies have not kept pace with new approaches to higher education.
  • expansion of competency-based education. And he said the federal rules governing financial aid make it hard for colleges to go big with those programs.
  • accreditors is that they favor the status quo, in part because they are membership organizations of academics that essentially practice self-regulation.
  • “The technology has reached the point where it really can improve learning,” he said, adding that “it can lower the costs.”
  • changes to the existing accreditation system that might make it easier for competency-based and other emerging forms of online education to spread.
  • offering competency-based degrees through a process called direct assessment, which is completely de-coupled from the credit-hour standard.
Maureen Greenbaum

A Peek Into the Future: What College Will Be Like in 10 Years - WSJ.com - 51 views

  • the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.
  • online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
  • Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
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  • s new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will "make universities more accountable for what they produce," Dr. Crow says.
  • The Classroom In the near future, professors will run their courses over digital platforms capable of collecting data on each student's progress. These platforms were initially developed for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. However, universities are now folding these platforms back into their traditional classes because they make it easier to share content, host discussions and keep track of student work. A professor might still "teach" a class, but most of the interaction will happen online.If professors and students do meet in a physical classroom, it will be to review material, work through problems or drill down on discussion topics. Scenes like John Houseman lecturing to an auditorium full of students in "The Paper Chase" will be a thing of the past.
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