Category Archives: Teaching

Do online classes suck?

By alex | Published: 12/8/2012
Before arriving at my current posting, I would have thought the idea that online classes compared poorly to their offline counterparts was one that was slowly and inevitably fading away. But a recent suggestion by a colleague that we might tell incoming freshmen that real students take traditional meatspace courses and those just interested in [...]
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Reddit, Course Discussion, and Badges

By alex | Published: 12/4/2012
This semester I am using a community on Reddit to run my course. I’m certainly not the first to do this. Here, for example, is a subreddit for a Japanese language course, part of the whole University of Reddit project. Using existing social software for course management is also nothing new. The code that runs [...]
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Mind the MOOC?

By alex | Published: 7/6/2012
Siva Vaidhyanathan has a new post up on the Chronicle blog that takes on the hype cycle around MOOCs. Which is a good thing. Experimenting with new ways learning online and off, particularly in higher ed, is more than a worthwhile venture. I think it probably does have a lot to do with the future [...]
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Research Universities and the Future of America

By alex | Published: 7/4/2012
In case you haven’t seen this yet… This is one of those cases where fostering the elite is a good thing. Nothing wrong with funding community colleges or making tuition at four-year institutions more reasonable, but we are systematically undermining our country both economically and culturally by undercutting our large research universities. All hail the [...]
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