Group items tagged

survey shows that colleges (w.liberal arts in sample) that have more spending per students, part time faculty and higher faculty-student ratios, get similar results on the NSSE score. A NSEE variable is "good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty"

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before." - this was something that administrators from Stanford mentioned in the Educause Learning Initiatives conference when discussing the biggest benefits they had seen from developing MOOCs

"Professors might be surprised by what the data tell them. Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard, drew murmurs from the crowd-which mostly consisted of Harvard and MIT faculty members-when he showed research indicating that students at a lecture have brain activity roughly equivalent to when they watch television." - this doesn't seem to surprising. There are some other interesting ideas mentioned like "Maybe we could have 100 people register for a seminar," Mr. Rabkin said. The students could work through the first 12 weeks independently and online, "and that teacher can finish the seminar five different times in the course of a 15-week semester, spending the last three weeks with each of those groups of 20."

I agree with this brain activity finding. Students constantly come to me and say "I understand what you are saying in class but when you ask me questions outside of class I do not know what to do." They are not paying attention. Even when I teach to the test, the results from online questions are equivalent (I need to check this formally). This has forced me to rely more on solving open ended problems in groups and getting students to write their own answers. So my principles class is turning into a first year problem solving seminar!

Would this be something any of our Wooster faculty would consider? Does it harken back to the days where teachers were paid with livestock, vegetables, etc. and were paid because the student felt they had learned something of value?

Some warnings about what institutions might be losing with the rush to MOOCs

How do we help faculty understand this issue better?

Kind of what we began to discuss at the Oct. meeting. Use the MOOC to flip the class. Our faculty spend their time with students going deeper into the subject and let the MOOC handle the content.

I sent this to some of the Fellows a few months (3-4) ago. This article gives a nice description of the service.

An interesting article to consider as the Faculty's role continues to shift away from content delivery.

The rogue academic.

"Students in the blended class did better than students in the traditional class.  They also did better than students in pure MOOCs."