Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Colleges embrace the online lecture model - Nick Anderson, The Washington Post

Dissatisfaction with live lectures helped drive Ng and Stanford colleague Daphne Koller to put course materials online. The success of those experiments led them last year to launch the MOOC platform Coursera. Coursera and edX, another online platform led by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have drawn millions of people around the world to sign up for free online classes from top-flight schools. And they have fueled debate about what matters most in instruction. Teaching reforms go well beyond MOOCs. In Maryland, educators have slashed live lecturing recently in courses such as Psychology 101 at Bowie State and Salisbury universities, Intermediate Algebra at Frostburg State, and Principles of Biology and Principles of Chemistry at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. "In the end, students are more satisfied, and faculty are more satisfied," said William E. "Brit" Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. http://nhregister.com/articles/2013/02/27/news/doc512e1286aeaf8330408681.txt