SCALE-UP: solving the shortcomings in traditional physics instruction
"Studio/workshop classes such as SCALE-UP (Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs) give instructors another choice by replacing the lecture/laboratory format with 4–6 hours of activity-based instruction per week, typically in 2-hour blocks. This format has several advantages over the traditional lecture/laboratory format. Because the entire class is taught in the same room with the same students and instructors in each class, all activities, including laboratory experiments, can be arranged to build on one another in sequence for greater learning impact (14) than when some activities are taught in small sections running parallel to the lecture course. When a lab section is taught as a separate course, it is often weeks or at best a few days ahead of or behind the lecture, and for some students, the lab course is not even taken in the same term as the lecture. Additionally, even in an interactive lecture, students can avoid instructors by hiding in the middle of the row, away from the aisles. In the studio format, instructors can freely circulate and interact with any group at any time."
(Robert Beichner and Jeffery Saul)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The creative use of mobile technologies to enhance learning and teaching in the performing and visual arts
Date: 26 Apr 2013, Location/venue: The Old Fire Station, University of Salford, England
The workshop"offers an opportunity for those involved in teaching, or directly managing degree programmes in the Arts, to find out more about the role mobile learning can play in enhancing the student and tutor experience. Through a series of presentations, activities and discussions, led by academics from the Arts discipline area, participants will be introduced to mobile technologies approaches and see discipline-focused exemplars of mobile learning applied in teaching practice."
(Higher Education Academy)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Minerva Project: seeks to satisfy global demand for an elite education
"Elite American universities maintain their prestige by turning away a huge percentage of applicants every year. And the education entrepreneur Ben Nelson sees an opportunity in this demand for top-flight education: He wants to reach talented students across the world and to build a new university that could remake the image of Ivy League education.
Mr. Nelson, founder of a start-up called the Minerva Project, believes the minuscule acceptance rates at prestigious institutions leave some college-bound students without a place where they can pursue a blue-ribbon degree. So his for-profit enterprise seeks to satisfy that demand by offering a rigorous online education to the brightest students around the world who slip through the cracks of highly selective admissions cycles. ...
To create these advanced courses, Minerva will break down the role of professor into two distinct jobs instead of simply poaching faculty members from other universities. The company will award monetary prizes to 'distinguished teachers among great research faculty,' Mr. Nelson said, who will team up with crews to videotape lectures and craft innovative courses when they are not teaching at their home institutions. (Mr. Nelson declined to elaborate on the size of the prizes.)
Minerva will then hire a second group of instructors to deliver the material. Mr. Nelson called them 'preceptors,' who will typically be young graduates of doctoral programs—they will lead class discussions online, hold office hours, and grade assignments."
(Nick DeSantis, 3 April 2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Online Educational Delivery Models: A Descriptive View
"Although there has been a long history of distance education, the creation of online education occurred just over a decade and a half ago - a relatively short time in academic terms. Early course delivery via the web had started by 1994, soon followed by a more structured approach using the new category of course management systems.1 Since that time, online education has slowly but steadily grown in popularity, to the point that in the fall of 2010, almost one-third of U.S. postsecondary students were taking at least one course online. Fast forward to 2012: a new concept called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is generating widespread interest in higher education circles. Most significantly, it has opened up strategic discussions in higher education cabinets and boardrooms about online education. Stanford, MIT, Harvard, the University of California–Berkeley, and others have thrown their support - in terms of investment, resources, and presidential backing - behind the transformative power of MOOCs and online education. National media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Atlantic are touting what David Brooks has called "the campus tsunami" of online education.
Unfortunately, a natural side effect of this new interest in education and educational technology is an increase in hype and in shallow descriptions of the potential for new educational models to replace the established system. All too often, the public discussion has become stuck in a false dichotomy of traditional vs. online - a dichotomy that treats all online models as similar and that ignores blended or hybrid approaches. This false dichotomy is even more evident now that discussions are spilling into national media forums. But in fact, as my colleague Molly Langstaff has described, educational technology is interacting with innovative educational courses and programs to create not only new language but also multiple models for delivering education."
(Phil Hill, 1 November 2012, Educause Quarterly)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Privileging the collective: the tradition of the atelier method in art and design education
"Art and design education has broadly settled on two categories of pedagogical frameworks, both evolutions from historical precedents. The first of these categories is driven by the spirit of the 'design collective', and comprises the art school studio or atelier model. This was established by the private Florentine art schools of the renaissance from around the 15th Century (King, 2003), always with a focus on making as well as learning from the group - from both peers and Masters. Later, this model of learning through practice carried over to the art schools of England: in his 1858 inaugural address for the Cambridge School of Art, John Ruskin (Ruskin, 1858) spoke about the relative futility of formal teaching per se and instead the pressing need for students to learn by repeated and applied making. For applied craft and design, this studio approach was the method under the influential Bauhaus School (1919-1933) in Germany (Droste, 2005). The second category derives from the teaching of industrial arts and is typically driven by the far greater student volume processing needs of the institution. This category comprises the 'hot desking' or increasingly the 'no-desking' model, with large taught classes in lecture format, and occasional group tutorials. Such a model is often the norm for universities' academic courses. The model spread to the creative courses that were more typically offered by polytechnics in the UK. The first polytechnic dates back to the early nineteenth century (Fox, 1832-1854), although most were established in the 1960's with a remit of applied education in industry and science for work. In many countries, the term 'technical college' is the same as a polytechnic - in both the UK and Australia, many of these colleges converted into universities in the last 30 years."
(Ashley Hall and Tom Barker, 2010)
Hall, A. and T. Barker (2010). "Design collectives in education: evaluating the atelier format and the use of teaching narrative for collective cultural and creative learning, and the subsequent impact on professional practice". In Alternative Practices in Design: Past Present and Future. H. Edquist and L. Vaughan. Melbourne, Victoria, RMIT University: Design Research Institute.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
