Poet Ponders the Digital

I have been contemplating if online learning differs by discipline, especially after reading a few studies on the topic. One of the studies (Xu & Jaggars, 2013), found: The subject areas in which the negative coefficients for online learning were weaker than average in terms of both course persistence and course grades (indicating that students were relatively better able to adapt to online learning in these subjects) were computer science, the applied professions, and natural science. Are the STEM fields that different, in terms of pedagogy and goals, from the humanities? Of course, we could certainly argue that the sciences are often taught divorced from ethics and humanistic concerns, but the teaching methods, objects, and outcomes assessments are my primary concern when reading such studies. Do Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work better in the STEM fields than in the humanities? The coding course I'm currently working through is offered by a Russian institution...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

Should a university use data-mining techniques to shape courses? College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education