Wooster Horizon Group

"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 reaction to Friedman's most recent Times article

"Thomas Friedman has MOOCs in his sights and that should worry all sides of the debate because Thomas Friedman operates a very large megaphone that helps shape public opinion, and also he is almost always wrong about everything."

"Thomas Friedman's latest column "The Professors' Big Stage" is a case in point. His piece on "the MOOCs revolution" is riddled with contradictions, shallow thinking -- and an error in basic arithmetic."

Many academics are saying this piece is totally off base. I'll include a couple of posts from Inside Higher Ed that challenge Friedman.

"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

"For some, teaching begins with authority and expertise. For the digital pedagogue, teaching begins with inquiry. And that's why digital pedagogy is so important. It reminds us that the new landscape of learning is mysterious and worth exploring." - an interesting position

"The council says it wants more students to earn college credit for learning that occurs outside the college classroom." - It may be time to examine our stance on accepting online credits.

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"

"My concern is that in most cases the online initiatives are not being done in a way that incorporates the online education into the educational mission of the institution - it is a financial, not educational advance."

Some food for thought in here.

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