On a recent episode of Quirks and Quarks, host Bob McDonald spoke with Sanjay Sarma, the head of Open Learning at MIT, about some of the issues we discussed on Tuesday afternoon. If you have 30 minutes, have a listen to the episode. Some point that stood out to me:
- Attempting to replicate the face-to-face classroom experience online, makes for the worst of both f2f and online teaching and learning.
- Instead, use synchronous sessions to generate learning by encouraging discussion and finding opportunities to spark students’ curiosity.
- The instructor as content-curator
- Cognitive science has demonstrated that “spacing” content is an effective learning practice. Cramming helps with short-term learning, but is not effective for “learning for life.”
Click through the presentation slides to see some takeaways from our discussion.
Some additional resources you may want to check out:
- American Sociological Association Section on Teaching annual address https://youtu.be/KeB6C7z5Isk
- Instagram Reality subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/
- Robin DeRosa’s use of student-generated OER content