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Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter.

"Use of in-class concept questions with clickers can transform an instructor-centered "transmissionist" environment to a more learner-centered constructivist classroom. To compare the effectiveness of three different approaches using clickers, pairs of similar questions were used to monitor student understanding in majors' and nonmajors' genetics courses. After answering the first question individually, students participated in peer discussion only, listened to an instructor explanation only, or engaged in peer discussion followed by instructor explanation, before answering a second question individually. Our results show that the combination of peer discussion followed by instructor explanation improved average student performance substantially when compared with either alone. When gains in learning were analyzed for three ability groups of students (weak, medium, and strong, based on overall clicker performance), all groups benefited most from the combination approach, suggesting that peer discussion and instructor explanation are synergistic in helping students. However, this analysis also revealed that, for the nonmajors, the gains of weak performers using the combination approach were only slightly better than their gains using instructor explanation alone. In contrast, the strong performers in both courses were not helped by the instructor-only approach, emphasizing the importance of peer discussion, even among top-performing students."

YouTube videos may soon be getting a little more interactive. There's now a page on the YouTube website describing a feature called "Video Questions Editor Beta," which was spotted by the Dutch tech site WebSonic.nl. The page itself is pretty bare-bones, but it describes the feature as a way for "multiple questions to be displayed on top of your video during playback that a viewer can answer." So video producers can add an interactive element to their content - imagine adding little quizzes to an educational video or introducing product questions to a video ad.

These are important questions, and I'm glad I have colleagues helping me try to answer them. But my initial response to these concerns is to respond with a question of my own: Instead of comparing a Coursera course to a traditional college class, what if we compare it to a textbook? This is the question that often pivots discussions of Coursera from skepticism to curiosity.

Questioning App using Bloom's Taxonomy to ask questions to students at their levels.

"In January, we featured series of short animations from BBC Radio 4 addressing the question "How Did Everything Begin?" In February, we featured its follow-up on an equally eternal question, "What Makes Us Human?" Both came scripted by Philosophy Bites co-creator Nigel Warburton and narrated by X-Files co-star Gillian Anderson (in full British mode). Now that March has come, so has the next installment of these brief, crisp, curiosity-fueled productions: "Has Technology Changed Us?""

"Regardless of the goal of MOOCs - be it for profit or idealism - there are genuine educational concerns that need to be closely monitored. A course with 10,000 (or even 1,000) students enrolled cannot foster any significant discussion. Yes, teaching assistants (TAs) can be employed to groups of 100-200 students for online questions etc, but that may not be so simple. About 100 TAs would be needed for a modest-sized MOOC of 10,000 students. Even for the lecturer to organise 100 TAs would be a Herculean task. Another serious concern is evaluation. How can one evaluate 20,000 students taking a course? Yes, electronic quizzes and multiple-choice tests can be given to monitor progress - if the material is suitable for such types of questions. But what about material in the social sciences and humanities that might be harder to evaluate (than science) without essay-style answers? I've already seen that companies are attempting to write computer programs that will grade essays. But as one educator put it, how can a programmer include wit and style for evaluation in such a program?"

"With this poorly articulated rationale in mind, I present first, some pros and cons to citing blogs within formal academic writing. Next, I put forth three main sub-questions that I think will help us-and by "us" I mean myself and the readers who grapple with the ethical and professional questions of rigor in standards of academic sourcing-organize our thoughts. "

"The question is not whether or not you should go to school, the question for the class of 2014 is what is your college plan and what is the likelihood that the college or university you attend will still be in business by the time you want to graduate."

"The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday morning in a key copyright-infringement case, with justices asking pointed questions about the resale and reuse of protected works. Many of the questions homed in on possible consequences for individual buyers as well as libraries and other institutions, but did not suggest which way the court was leaning."

"The prototype Tracker is based on a concise set of questions which have been intensively tested with HE and FE students for readability and ease of response. It builds on resources such as the Jisc/NUS Digital Student Experience benchmarking tool, and the Jisc guide to Enhancing the Digital Student Experience: a strategic approach. The questions cover issues that are important to learners and/or to staff with a focus on the learning experience."

"When I ask these questions to professional development presenters or district office personnel, I almost never get a straight answer. I've learned not to ask those questions. It's almost always perceived as a challenge to one's expertise or authority. Over the years, people have accused me of not "believing in" research. And they're right."

"What is a course? What is a class? What is a community? What is the relationship between those three questions and an even more basic one that is rarely asked in higher education: How do we learn? It is our conviction that, to address the literacies we need to thrive in the 21st century, we first need to step back and think about the conventions of education that we have inherited and to ask the big "why" and "how" questions of those conventions."

" 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."

"Cognii VLA is a type of an intelligent tutoring system that engages learners in a real time, one to one coaching conversation, helping them revise their answers. Unlike other tutoring systems, Cognii VLA uses learners' own natural language, not their selections in multiple choice items, as the basis for assessment. Because open response questions are more accurate than multiple choice questions in assessing deep understanding and critical thinking, Cognii VLA can provide better coaching than earlier systems. "

Tool to generate questions by and for a community of students.

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

"Facebook "likes" are being added to webpages even if a user has not clicked a like button, or even visited the page in question, the company has admitted. A US security researcher found that simply sending a web address to a friend using Facebook's private messaging function would add two likes to that page. "

The question being asked is completely backward. Why aren't the lessons being recorded by the schools and made available online for the students to review later at home when they're working on home work. Or, the students could study for a test by reviewing any lessons they didn't do well on.

#udsnf12 recent upheaval at UVA was connected to some of the MOOC questions we discussed in class.