“Soonish” is a book about the near future, or “near-ish”, anyway. Unlike predictions of what will happen many decades from now, which are inevitably far off the mark, “Soonish” is an attempt to describe technological developments that have already shown some plausibililty.
All academics are encouraged to become reviewers to keep abreast of new developments in their field, to help shape the direction of their discipline, and as their scholarly responsibility. The article has many more details and is worth a quick look.
MOOCs, massive open online courses, are gaining credibility. Two organizations offering MOOCs are Coursera and Udacity. These organizations have been fielding demographic surveys to better understand the background of the enrolled students and why they chose to take the MOOC courses. An article by Steve Kolowich in Inside Higher Education summarizes some of the survey data. One pertinent finding was that the majority of the enrolled MOOC students reside outside of the United States.
Bruce Henderson in The Chronicle of Higher Education calls faculty to be more proactive in defining their contributions to educational institutions. In this time of cuts to education, university and secondary school faculty must help the general public understand the nature of their contributions.
Pamela Hieronymi wrote an interesting commentary about the increased need for teachers in the “tsunami” of technology. She readily admits that technology can enhance education and is here to stay. The plethora of technology options will force teachers to reflect on their role in the classroom and to become more effective. Hieronymi aptly describes teachers as “personal trainers in intellectual fitness”. The personal training and individual guidance becomes more necessary, not less, as the information options increase.
Tammy Erickson states that our current approach to education was designed for a different age. It was modeled on the needs of industrialization, resulting in separate subjects, standardized curricula, conformity, and batch processing. The model worked well for 100 years because it satisfied the needs of employers. However, the needs of employers have change and the gap between the output of our educational system and the job demands of the current century is big. Traditional schools operate in ways that are foreign to the world in which students live. The students inhabit a technology-based world of multimedia, addictive games, and mobile access. They are living in the most stimulating period in the history of the earth. But then schools require them to put that all away and ask them to focus on one, often-not-that-engaging speaker. It is not surprising that students get distracted and are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. A change the educational system is desperately needed.
Universities, community colleges, and high schools can use MOOCs to create an environment to enhance student learning. Last fall a professor at San Jose State used recorded MOOC lectures in an introductory electrical engineering course to create a flipped classroom. Students passed at a much higher rate than usual—91%, compared with 59% and 55% in two other, more traditional sections of the s
Social media is getting a lot of attention as a way to disseminate information and to get students involved in chemistry classes.
Celebrating 90 Years as the Premier Chemical Education Journal
The January 2013 issue marks the start of the 90th volume of the Journal of Chemical Education. This latest issue plus the content of all past volumes, 1 through 89, are available at http://pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc.
The February 2013 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available.
