The following video is based on the contributions of 200 students and provides us with some illustrations of the problems that students are facing today in higher education.
An impressive reply was posted to this project‘s website, providing us with ‘A vision of professors today’.
The University of Florida ran into (hardware) problems when they started to use their learning management system for the online component of blended programmes with extra large student groups. Server outages and slowdowns resulted when large numbers of students accessed the system simultaneously (e.g. when doing an online end of course quiz). Full story
Jack Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, had three major concerns about his students’ learning:
These concerns drove him to find an alternative mode of course delivery – hybrid courses. Link to article in which Johnson reflects on the change.
Okay, the above words are the umpteenth variation on Descartes’ words but “iPods in Education: Innovations in the Implementation of Mobile Learning” by Dr Michael Thomas, Associate Professor at Nagoya University, is a must read anyway. Thomas actually podcast (or is it podcasted?) this article about podcasting, and to make things complete there is a full transcript. Take your pick: listen and read, or read, or listen! Must be Thomas’ background in language teaching that made him think of offering this useful redundancy!
What chances do you see for the use of podcasting with large student groups? Leave a reply and tell us.
