the education of tomorrow

Teaching and the University of Tomorrow

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/768-teaching-and-the-university-of-tomorrow

MOOC promoters continually claim that their products provide technologies that have never appeared in face-to-face classrooms. While I don’t disagree that my courses have lacked fun ways to draw molecules (because I teach in the humanities), I do find their insistence that traditional higher ed lacks technological advances to be odd. If you took the MOOC prophets seriously, it would seem that all real-time professors do is lecture to bored students. – See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/768-teaching-and-the-university-of-tomorrow#sthash.RuCJxbAU.dpuf

What I believe Kelly Backer [intentionally?] misses to say is that MOOC claims to be progressive, meaning “a new mode/model” of teaching, but it relays on the old (from medieval times) values: the attempt to put “skin in the game” or pay for certificates, fails, since, according to Backer, the employers don’t care about those certificates. It is not sufficient to “move” the teaching process in the “future,” if the evaluation process remains in the medieval terms. 

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