By . It will be the imagination of teachers inventing new ways of teaching that will eventually result in the kinds of graduates the world will need in the future. More...
Ensuring quality teaching in a digital age: key takeaways
By . However, there are some substantial changes. The focus here is as much on applying basic principles of course design to face-to-face and blended/hybrid learning as to fully online course design.
More importantly, this chapter attempts to pull together all the principles from all previous ten chapters into a set of practical steps towards the design of quality teaching in a digital age. More...
Rereading Like a Writer: On Having #FuturesEd Students Assign "Project Classroom Makeover"
I never do this. I had no choice this time. It is required. An assignment. Read more...
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 4
By Michael Feldstein. In part 1 of this series, I talked about some design goals for a conversation-based learning platform, including lowering the barriers and raising the incentives for faculty to share course designs and experiment with pedagogies that are well suited for conversation-based courses. Part 2 described a use case of a multi-school faculty professional development course which would give faculty an opportunity to try out these affordances in a low-stakes environment. In part 3, I discussed some analytics capabilities that could be added to a discussion forum—I used the open source Discourse as the example—which would lead to richer and more organic assessments in conversation-based courses. But we haven’t really gotten to the hard part yet. The hard part is encouraging experimentation and cross-fertilization among faculty. More...
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 3
By Michael Feldstein. In the first part of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that supports conversation-based courses. In the second part, I brought up a use case of a kind of faculty professional development course that works as a distributed flip, based on our forthcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning. In the next two posts, I’m going to go into some aspects of the system design. More...
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2
By Michael Feldstein. In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:
- Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
- Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
- Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
- Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.
I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. More...
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 1
By Michael Feldstein. Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind. CBE is loosely tied to family of pedagogical methods, perhaps the most important of which at the moment is mastery learning. More...
Studieren, wo andere von der Mensa träumen
Von Jürgen Mlynek. In Heidelberg schwärmen Studenten vom Essen, in Konstanz vom Blick auf den Bodensee und in Dresden vom Maschinenbau-Diplom. Wir stellen die drei Unis vor. Mehr...
Spitze geht nicht überall!
Von Jürgen Mlynek. "Die Exzellenzinitiative braucht ein neues Ziel", hieß es an dieser Stelle vor zwei Wochen. Bloß nicht!, sagt der Physikprofessor Jürgen Mlynek und warnt vor einer neuen Gleichmacherei in der Hochschulpolitik.
Spätestens im vergangenen Herbst war es an der Zeit, misstrauisch zu werden. Gerade hatten sich Bund und Länder verständigt, all die erfolgreichen Wissenschaftspakte der vergangenen Jahre fortsetzen zu wollen, da fiel in der begleitenden Pressemitteilung eine Formulierung ins Auge. Mehr...
Hausarbeiten schreiben bei Nacht: Mach sie fertig!
Im Foyer lockt Kaffeegeruch, Wegweiser leiten Studenten an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität (HHU) in Düsseldorf zum Beratungsmarathon. Es gibt Workshops zu den Themen Prokrastination und Zeitmanagement, sie sollen Studenten helfen, endlich ihre Hausarbeiten zu schreiben und sie nicht länger aufzuschieben. Mehr...