Friday, September 26, 2014

All Things in Modulation - Carl Straumsheim, Tomorrow's Professor

It's a concept known as modularity. Instead of reassembling a face-to-face course, lecture by lecture, institutions are urging faculty members creating online courses (and not just MOOCs) to split coursework into modules. For example, a 15-week course on Shakespeare could be transformed into modules on his poetry, comedies, tragedies and historical plays. "We've got to pick the greatest hits, as it were, of your course and find some of the material that you think, 'Boy, if [students] only have one exposure to me or my course, here are four things I want them to know,' " said Joshua Morrill, a senior evaluator at UW-Madison. http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/enewsletter.php?msgno=1351