BY JONATHAN REES Do you remember MOOCs? I realize that that question is itself cliche now, but if you do remember massive open online courses you almost certainly remember the quote about how in the future there were only going to be ten universities and that “There’s a tsunami coming.” Needless to say, there are…
BY AARON BARLOW Those advocating a permanent move online for a much greater proportion of college classes are, I think, purposefully conflating two different needs in their quest. The first is the need for all teachers to be comfortable using digital tools, something we all have been woefully remiss in fulfilling. The second is the…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of several books and many articles on higher education, including most recently The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. He serves on the advisory board for Academe. The…
BY DAVID J. SIEGEL AND DANIEL M. CARCHIDI This is a guest post by the co-authors of “The Meaning of MOOC-topia” in the May–June issue of Academe. David J. Siegel is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. Daniel M. Carchidi is associate director of IT academic technology at the University of New Hampshire. Back…
This is a guest post by David Schultz, a contributor to the September-October issue of Academe and professor of political science at Hamline University. He was formerly AAUP chapter president at Trinity University in Texas and Minnesota state chair for AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Higher education’s business plan, as I argue in “The Rise and Coming Demise of the…
The rise of online courses—massive and open or just regularly-sized—is one of the major trends in higher education over the last few years. Of course, the rapidly growing access to high speed Internet has been crucial in helping online education spread, but as Julie Vargas explains in the new issue of Academe, today’s online courses…
I remember how shocked I was upon finding out that some students were taking all of their classes online–while living in the dorms. Then I was dismayed, too, that the source I learned this absurd behavior from did not even try to pull a Captain Renault out of Casablanca and say, “I’m shocked, shocked to find…
This is a guest post by Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history emerita at Yeshiva University. She also is a former editor of Academe and served on the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Her article, “One Historian’s Perspective on Academic Freedom and the AAUP,” is in the January-February issue of Academe. Since I no longer edit…
by: Ioana Literat, George Carstocea, Ash Kramer A reflection on the MOOC debate in higher education, this post was written in the context of Prof. Virginia Kuhn’s graduate seminar, IML 555: Digital Pedagogies, at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California. As students in this class, a key element of our research project was enrolling in…
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been getting a lot of attention lately. The idea of free access to higher education via online classes challenges our traditional assumptions about good undergraduate pedagogy–that small class sizes and significant face-to-face time with professors are crucial to learning. As a parent with two kids at private universities, I find…