"I truly believe that most of my full-time, tenure-track colleagues would rather quit their jobs than teach an online course. And that's a shame, since they are exactly the people who should be helping to set standards for meaningful online education."
"I'm not a radical, or anti-establishment - I've loved and respected working at every university I've joined. I just happen to have moved into a different learning delivery model because I knew it would give me greater flexibility to continue with my academic interests and spend more time with my family. It's a model that fits around my life.
That's something I share in common with my students. They aren't unusual either. They just choose to study online because the flexibility suits them. Online higher education means students can combine education with employment - often fast-tracking their careers as a result - or fit study around family commitments."
"I am particularly excited by the plans we have for what we're calling "MOOC-supported learning communities," in which local groups of MOOC participants benefit from and contribute to the overall MOOC experience, as well as our plans to share the materials we develop for the MOOC (videos, assignments, other resources) in an open-source fashion."
the results offer evidence that designating full-time faculty members to focus chiefly on teaching, particularly at research-intensive universities like Northwestern, may not be the cause for alarm that many see. It may even improve students' learning.
"Perhaps," they wrote, "the growing practice of hiring a combination of research-intensive tenure-track faculty members and teaching-intensive lecturers may be an efficient and educationally positive solution to a research university's multitasking problem."
Yes, students are distracted by media, especially their mobile technologies. As I wrote in a previous ProfHacker post, the answer to this problem, however, is not to ban or ignore these technologies. The answer is to incorporate them.
"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."