At Harvard symposium many profs advocate moving classes online - Mary Carmichael, Boston Globe

The group convened in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building for a one-day symposium on learning and teaching, the first salvo in a $40 million attempt by Harvard to rethink education. The initiative’s proximate goal is to make Harvard’s teachers better, but the ultimate goal is much more ambitious: to improve education beyond Harvard Yard, perhaps in ways that cannot yet be foreseen. “We’re going to experiment with lots of things. Some of them will work, and some of them won’t work,’’ Harvard president Drew Faust said in a phone interview yesterday. “But students are inventing new ways of doing things that will change classrooms, no matter what we do.’’ At the symposium, many professors argued for making classes more interactive and moving them online.