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University professors need to accept the fact that like most fields, education is constantly evolving due to technological advancements. The traditional classroom is changing, but the refusal of many tenured professors to change with it hinders the efficiency of education to improve. The university not only needs to provide incentives for professors to utilize these online resources, but also mandate that they at least be offered. In the next few years, it is unavoidable that some people will prefer and continue to use traditional methods of education. Yet, at the bare minimum, cheaper alternatives to over-priced textbooks and online resources need to be offered and available to university students.

"If administrators really wanted to improve the quality of any particular online course, they would cut the professor a check and walk away.  No, I'm not talking free money here.  There'd be a call for proposals, and reports at the end to demonstrate that the professors who got the money did what they said they'd do.  All the usual accountability measures.  If the professor needs help making this happen, then they can call the instructional designers rather than the other way around.  If administrators wanted to find a place to fund these checks, they could just cut out all the money going to for-profit Silicon Valley startups rather than the actual educational experience and give it to faculty instead."

"Professors typically don't worry about what price point an online course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students' e-mails."

"Two professors at the University of Texas at Austin have given birth to a new term, SMOC, which stands for "synchronous massive online class." How's it different? The Wall Street Journal describes it as "somewhere between a MOOC...a late night television show and a real-time research experiment," where "students, professors and teaching assistants [are required] to be online at the same time." Running what appears to be a live MOOC doesn't come cheap: the two professors admitted they needed 125 school employees to run the show. And that may be why they're hoping to charge non-UT students for their intro to psychology SMOC"

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

"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."

The reason is that the top universities do not offer the best teaching and learning experiences. Instead, their faculty members are incentivized heavily to focus on research at the expense of teaching. If a professor seeking tenure at one of these institutions receives a teaching award, it is often said that that professor has just received the kiss of death for her tenure hopes. If students learn at these institutions, it's often not because the teaching is so good, but because the students are so talented that they can absorb anything thrown at them (and it's worth noting that just because a professor is entertaining, does not mean it's a good learning experience).

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."

"On average, faculty participants reported working 61 hours per week - more than 50 percent over the traditional 40-hour work week. They worked 10 hours per day Monday to Friday and about that much on Saturday and Sunday combined. Perhaps surprisingly, full professors reported working slightly longer hours both during the week and on weekends than associate and assistant professors, as well as chairs."

Undergraduates are significantly more likely to major in a field if they have an inspiring and caring faculty member in their introduction to the field. And they are equally likely to write off a field based on a single negative experience with a professor.

Striking the right tone can be difficult. Professors aren't always natural performers, at least not on a par with professional actors. They also aren't famous, and Mr. Kimmel's setup works partly because viewers have a "parasocial" relationship to celebrities. That means they often know a great deal about famous people and even feel as if they're friends with them, even though there's a vast distance between them, said Dannagal G. Young, an associate Professor of communication at the University of Delaware.

"Here's what happened," he continues. "First, when one student has the right answer and the other doesn't, the first one is more likely to convince the second-it's hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one. More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur-and this is the crux of the method. You're a student and you've only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it's not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces."

Last week marked the second time the Office of IT Academic Technology Services organized webinars focused on teaching professors about different resources they can use in their classroom as part of a week-long event called Open Education Week. Though eight events were held last week, Educational Technologist Mathieu Plourde said few professors participated.

""[I]t's presumptive to assume that we should share other people's work w/o asking," wrote @eetempleton, an assistant professor of English. "I would disagree," rejoined @alothian, another English assistant professor. "when I speak & others tweet, I learn a LOT about my own ideas." Some worried that having someone tweet their insights before they publish might increase the likelihood that they will be scooped by a colleague - although others regarded that notion as slightly paranoid.  "

"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

"At the end of the semester, however, students would be required to return the print version to the publisher, preventing them from selling their used casebooks back to a bookstore or to their peers. "My immediate reaction was: 'My goodness, they are trying to to kill first sale!'" said Mr. Grimmelmann, a professor of law at Maryland."

"In a paper released on Monday, Christine Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, argues that using informal social-media settings to carry on debates about science can help students refine their argumentative skills, increase their scientific literacy, and supplement learning in the classroom. Past studies have shown that informal settings, like conversations with friends, can facilitate learning, but according to Ms. Greenhow, very little has been studied about informal online contexts and social networks, like Facebook applications."

"In the end, student satisfaction and enjoyment are being sacrificed for a select pool of research-based positions."

"I'd like to communicate with people both in and out of academe, and I have no moral objection to being paid for my time and effort. This - being a professor, a writer, a speaker - is how I make my living, after all."