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"Teacher Knows if You've Done the E-Reading"

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

"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!

More relevant to the Massively Open Online Community courses (MOOCs) being piloted in higher education, a team of researchers from that replacing a physics teacher with lectures from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist nearly doubled test scores [PDF] http://www.um.es/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=c538d7e7-52a4-4f9a-93c7-92ac04c80b06&groupId=115466 

Response to "A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher."

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?