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"Even if you routinely teach large courses, a MOOC requires far more time to prepare and execute. To prepare the three lectures offered in a single week, my team spent about 20 hours planning and developing content. I spent an additional eight hours rehearsing my lectures. It took just under four hours to record the video for three formal lectures. I cannot speak to the editing process, because another unit at Georgia Tech does that work, but it usually takes five to 10 days to receive the edited video and get Coursera approval. Even then there is more work to incorporate any quiz links or other "in-class work" that takes place during lecture pauses. Finally there is the "Courserafication" process of uploading and configuring the content for use on our Coursera site. Formatting assignments and other content takes still more time."

"The big shift: far fewer in-class lectures. Students will watch the lectures on Coursera beginning Monday. "Class will become a time for activities and also teamwork," said Sinnott-Armstrong. He's devised exercises to help on-campus students engage with the concepts in the class, including a college bowl-like competition, a murder mystery night and a scavenger hunt, all to help students develop a deeper understanding of the material presented in the lectures."

" I lecture so that I can model how an expert approaches problems. If my students have read the book (or, for the flippers, watched the video) before class, they have (I hope) obtained some basic facts and also have at least the beginnings of an understanding of how those facts fit together. If I assign them problems or questions to grapple with, they will eventually work toward a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. What the in-class lecture adds is a model of how an expert approaches questions."

"Although there have been many claims that technology might enhance university teaching, there are wide variations in how technology is actually used by lecturers. This paper presents a survey of 795 university lecturers' perceptions of the use of technology in their teaching, showing how their responses were patterned by institutional and subject differences. There were positive attitudes towards technology across institutions and subjects but also large variations between different technologies. Two groups of technology were identified-"core" technologies, such as Powerpoint, that were used frequently, even when lecturers felt that they were not having a positive impact on learning, and "marginal" technologies, such as blogs, that were used much less frequently and only where they fitted the pedagogic approach or context. Rather than there being "leading" universities that were the highest users of all technologies, institutions tended to be heavier users of some technologies than others. Similarly, subjects could be associated with particular technologies rather than being consistent users of technology in general. The study suggests that university technology policy should reflect different disciplines and contexts rather than "one size fits all" directives."

Lecturers in higher education often consider the incorporation of web technologies into their teaching practice. Partially structured and populated course site templates could aid them in getting started with creating and deploying webbased materials and activities to enrich the teaching and learning experience. Discussions among instructional technology support staff and lecturers reveal a paucity of robust specifications for possible course site features that could comprise a template. An attempted mapping from the teaching task as understood by the instructor to the envisaged course website properties proves elusive. We conclude that the idea of an initial state for a course site, embodied in a template, remains useful and should be developed not according to a formula but with careful attention to the context and existing pedagogical practice. Any course template provided for the use of lecturers should be enhanced with supporting instructions and examples of how it may be adapted for their particular purposes.

"I've come to believe that most professors who cling to the lecture format do so because they crave being the center of attention - even when their audience is indifferent or hostile. Faculty get so little respect these days outside the classroom that it seems only natural for us to covet whatever respect we can garner from within it."

"It was an interesting conference, with several excellent speakers. One message became clear. In the words of Mark Valenti of the Sextant Group in UB's June edition of its magazine: "we're basically seeing  the beginning of the end of the lecture hall.' In essence, new technology, hybrid learning and the need to engage students and develop core '21st century skills' are leading some institutional leaders to rethink the classroom and the way it's used - and about time."

"Our flipped school model is quite simple. Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they've already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education. To change the learning environment even further, we've used Google Groups to enable students to easily communicate outside of class, participate in large discussions related to their schoolwork and learn from each other."

" Instructors will offer a "special 'flipped' version of an electrical engineering course ... where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home." So the good is the flipped part because it's more interactive and dynamic and there's less lecture-based didacticism in the classroom due to watching videos at home? Really? The 1970s just called: they want their Open University courses back. This model perhaps moves the Cal State system forward as it offers more accessibility to content for working adults in a hybrid format. I wish they would just step away from the MOOC terminology, which is, let's be honest, copying and lending out a videotape in another name."

In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Two of these courses, database and machine learning, corresponded to spring 2012 courses that I would be teaching at Vanderbilt University. I recognized that I could use the lecture materials from these classes to "flip" my own classes by having students view lectures before the class meeting, which then could be used for other learning activities.

"The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer. "I think that the impact is going to be massive and transformative," says Mr Wales, describing the importance of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students."

Some University of Delaware faculty members have begun "flipping the classroom," recording brief lectures or demonstrations for their students to view outside the classroom so that more class time can be spent on other activities. Faculty have found the Self Service Studio in 309 Gore Hall an easy-to-use resource for recording material to supplement their students' classroom experience: homework solutions, prerequisite material, lectures, demonstrations and other resources.

"Mr Nelson said that a key priority was to improve the online user experience, warning that "the state of most learning management systems is verging on embarrassing in the face of the smartphone generation" and that "grainy footage of an hour-long lecture, filmed from the back of the lecture hall, just won't cut it"."

Great article - thanks. The thought: "no room for complacency" is powerfully pertinent.

"Last fall, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher "flipped" his graduate-level course on machine learning. Instead of having his students read their textbook before class or watch lecture videos that he created, as is typical for a "flipped" classroom, Doug asked his students to prepare for class by taking another professor's course, a massive open online course (MOOC) offered by Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng on the Coursera platform. Doug's students watched Professor Ng's lecture videos and completed quizzes and other assignments within the MOOC, then came to class to discuss that material with Doug along with additional readings that went beyond the MOOC material. When Andrew Ng's course ended, Doug's students spent the remaining weeks of the semester engaged in projects that required them to apply what they had learned throughout the course."

"Virtual worlds promise to deliver the best aspects of both real-world classrooms and online distance learning into a single platform. With tools that provide avatars that represent the educators and the students, voice and video capabilities, powerpoint and other collaborative whiteboard technologies and group and private messaging chat, educators are finding that the newest generation of virtual worlds can simplify the lecture and presentation process, allow students to ask/answers questions to their teacher or each other (without interrupting the lecture), socialize and learn in a very streamlined manner. All of this is done with the convenience and cost efficiency of distance learning."

"I think there may be a certain type of learner that this works for - someone who is highly motivated and purposeful, who is seeking out specific knowledge. And someone who does not require much human interaction - because in spite of the rhetoric about personalization, lectures are inherently impersonal, and videos of lectures are doubly so.   So if the MOOC is ushering in a golden age, democratizing access to knowledge, it seems to have hit a bit of a bump. I think the bump in the road is the learner."

""we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes." (p. 3) Using a set of effective tutor characteristics identified by Lepper and Wolverton (a reference to their research is in the article), Wood and Tanner explore how these seven characteristics can be adapted and used in large lecture courses (and what they propose isn't applicable just in biology courses). Here are some of the suggestions offered for each tutor characteristic."

"The rock-star meme implies that teaching is all about performance. What happens on stage is still what matters, even if techno-hip educators supplant traditional sages. Talk of rock-star faculty members reinforces the static lecture model that MOOCs were, ironically, developed in part to destroy. The audience at a rock concert is listening, not interacting. Decades of research and a modicum of common sense confirm that students engage and learn more through active participation in the classroom. For all the talk of personalized analytics and adaptive learning, MOOCs built around faculty rock stars will just transfer the lean-back experience of the lecture hall to a screen."

"At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model-so new and controversial right now-as the "normal" college experience. "Do we even have regular math classes here?" she asks."

As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college-the expansive campuses and large lecture halls-will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online.