This guy teaches both a campus and MOOC course on physics. He is no amateur, a world-class researcher in atomic physics, winner of four major research prizes and three students who won Nobel prizes. When he compared their learning gains, he was astonished at the results. “
Given the many positive announcements from vendors and negative reactions from academics about #moocs, there is a remarkable lack of research on learning outcomes. Why this lack of interest? Well one feature of academic research is that it rarely looks at itself, for fear of what it will find. The lecture is the stand-out example. Despite many decades of research showing that lectures, and hterefore the professional job title ‘lecturers’, make little pedagogic sense, most academics will dive into the trenches of irrational indignity in their defence. But reson will prevail and on MOOCs we are now seeing some wonderful research by the likes of MIT and the University of Edinburgh.
Curated from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk
A very useful piece of research that challenges the ages old view of the effectiveness of lecturing and that also looks at the learning outcomes and effectiveness of MOOCs.
