This video interview [1] with Dr Bowen poses some interesting questions:If, as he recommends, lectures can be kept out of the classroom and instead be delivered as podcasts ahead of the lesson, and if the podcasts need not feature the classroom lecturers themselves but could be authored by the top experts from other institutions, what kind of business model is going to evolve from this practice? Is it going to be based on Open Courseware, or will the top institutions sell podcast lectures by their top experts? His analogy with the text book market is probably adequate.For institutions using physical classrooms, a good reputation for the quality of the time students spend in their classrooms can provide decisive competitive advantage. How to exploit such an advantage if the number of students in the class is very, very large?Dr Bowen´s advice is to direct the students to watch the lecture ahead of the meeting, which leaves you most of the class time for questions and discussion with non-virtual quality. This is obviously a good strategy, particularly with very large cohorts of students taking the same class.However, he also suggests a quiz accompanying the lecture should be attached to the podcast on the VLE, or whichever virtual platform is used. This suggestion seems to assume students will be watching the podcast while logged on to the virtual platform, but some students will download the podcast and actually watch or listen to it on mobile devices that are not capable of answering a quiz, and this may happen just as they travel to the classroom.I think a lecture quiz can therefore be best placed as a warmer to start the classroom discussion. PowerPoint slides might still have a role in interactive classroom teaching if they can be a medium for such a quiz.Let me think, when was it I was introduced to zapper pedagogy? It must have been in 2005-6 at the University of Wolverhampton, using voting systems to increase interactive learning with their classroom performance systems and personal response units.Ah, getting an interactive whiteboard to work... What better way to start the day?Alec________________________________[1]Young, Jeffrey R. (2009) 'Teach Naked' Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms : When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom, Chronicle of Higher Education, 20th July, [accessed 4th Aug 2009] http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/
You need to be a member of Library 2.0 to add comments!
Replies