Here we are: the point in the semester where many a dedicated instructor quails before the giant stack of papers on his or her desk. If your students are handing in their papers only a day or two before they leave campus, writing carefully considered comments can feel like putting a message in a bottle. … Continue reading »
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Course of the Future Syllabus Fair
***** Come to the ***** * Course of the Future * **** Syllabus Fair! **** Monday April 30, 3:00-4:30pm CGIS S-030 GSAS and the Bok Center invite you to peruse the products of the spring “Designing the Course of the Future” seminar at a poster reception with hors d’ouevres and beverages. Seminar participants will be on hand to … Continue reading »
Bok Center Profile: Questions for Associate Director John Girash
John Girash Science & Engineering specialist, Head TF Network, Activity-Based Learning, Harvard College Fellows, Designing the Course of the Future, Research-Based Pedagogy Tell us something we wouldn’t have guessed about you. I play bari sax in the Harvard Alumni Jazz Band! What project are you working on right now? The “Designing the Course of the … Continue reading »
Around the Web: MOOCs and Value
MOOC start-up Coursera announced this week that it would partner with another three major universities. What’s a MOOC, you ask? It’s a Massive Open Online Course, and an acronym that you’ll only see more of. Coursera, like Udacity, grew out of one of Stanford’s early MOOCs. (Wired recently did a profile of Udacity’s co-founder, Sebastian Thrun.) As … Continue reading »
Mark Your Calendar: April 20th Webinar on Creating Learner-Centered Environments
Nicole Mills, coordinator of the Beginning French language Program at Harvard, will be presenting a webinar hosted by the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC), and you’re invited! Dr. Mills will be discussing how to implement situated learning theory in the classroom. The webinar will include an overview of situationist and experiential learning theory, and will then … Continue reading »
From TF to Course Head
For the last meeting of their year-long Teaching Colloquium and Pedagogy Practicum, third-year graduate students in the Music Department looked ahead to the next step in their professional development: teaching their own courses. Departmental Teaching Fellow Meredith Schweig assembled a panel of recent Music PhDs to share what they’ve learned as they transition from serving … Continue reading »
Departmental Teaching Fellows at Work!
We’re long overdue for celebrating some of the great work done by the Bok Center’s trusty Departmental Teaching Fellows. Here are just a few examples of the diverse work undertaken by these graduate students: In the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Naseem Surhio organized several workshops this semester, including a “Reflections on Teaching” workshop … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Where to Start?
I was struck by two recent proposals for improving higher education—both were impassioned and well reasoned, but they started from opposite premises. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ann Kirschner explores what real innovation in higher education might look like if we could manage to learn a thing or two from how businesses innovate. Kirschner takes … Continue reading »
Overheard at HILT
Regarding the time we spend teaching, one HILT presenter asked, Assuming we see increases in teaching productivity (faster grading, more efficient learning) thanks to technological change, what are we going to do with productivity gains? What are we going to do with our free time? What do you think? How would your teaching change if … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Access, Open and Closed
This week’s big news in technology and education was Blackboard’s announcement that it is acquiring Moodle, and that Moodle’s platform will remain open-source. (Inside Higher Ed offers a thorough breakdown of what the announcement means; another article suggests that Blackboard may have switched focus because the real value for LMS services lies in the data they … Continue reading »
