Essay: Isolation in Online Education
Online collaboration is not just a bonus for our students, it’s how they communicate ,what they have come to expect, and what we as online educators need to provide. As educators there is no excuse to be a decade behind where our students are – we simply must collaborate in our online classes, or risk isolating an entire generation of online students.
Essay: Moocs: A Noble Dinosaur
MOOCs -- despite all of their hype as cutting edge endeavors -- are in reality an old fashioned conceit disguised as cutting edge technology. By design, due to their massive class sizes, MOOCs must jettison many of the collaborative elements of online learning that have proved so effective in recent years.
Essay: Textbook alternatives
The college textbook is a lumbering beast – an outdated, inaccessible mass of confusion that leaves students and their teachers completely overwhelmed – and as we've suspected for years, students simply do not read them, if, in fact, they can afford to purchase them in the first place. These alternative formats take time to collate, granted, and the lure of remaining with the same textbook through is strong, but by collating assigned readings personally, faculty will save themselves time and effort in the long run.
