Online Education May Make Top Colleges More Elite, Speakers Say - Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Online tools that track how much students use certain course materials could give professors insight into how they should design their traditional courses, several panelists said. 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. Eric S. Rabkin, a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, suggested that professors could direct students to learn the most basic material in a course at their own pace, via online modules. Professors could then use the time saved, he said, on the parts of the course that require more thoughtful, individual attention, such as giving feedback on long essays. http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Education-May-Make-Top/137687/