Group items tagged

What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.

My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)

Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information.

Effective teaching is variable

They do not teach the same way and use the same instructional repertoire year after year

Effective teaching is contextual

I'd be very concerned if we try to nationalize or standardize expectations of what counts as competency," she said. "The credit hour is a fundamental academic decision. Faculty should decide what's attached to coursework."

Many colleges embrace Advanced Placement examinations as universal markers of quality, she said. Lawyers and doctors also have rigorous qualifying exams that are essentially competency-based assessments.

This is not the right time to jump off the old credit-hour boat and assume that new competency-based assessments are primed and ready to sail," she said. "And we should definitely not kid ourselves that there are strong standardized tests already available that can do the job for us."

First, successful change leaders clearly articulate the need for change to a variety of audiences in ways that are intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling. The ability to do this requires that change leaders immerse themselves into radically different worlds

nderstand deeply is the world for which they are preparing their students

what skills, what habits of mind, and what dispositions