courses

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

VIDEO REELS

Ethnic Studies Courses Likely To Be Met With Resistance, Although Now Required By California law

In August 2020, California passed a law that requires college students in the state university system to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate. In essence, the California state legislature has made it mandatory for the nearly 500,000 students in the Cal State system to take the classes that student activists and others fought for universities to implement decades ago. While these classes are not without controversy, as a scholar who studies racial dynamics on college campuses, I argue their benefits outweigh their liabilities. These classes are offered throughout the country at colleges and universities as varied and diverse as Bowling Green State University and the University of Washington. When these classes are taught as they were intended – with a heavy focus on issues of...

Massive online open courses see exponential growth during COVID-19 pandemic

Massive open online classes, or MOOCs, have seen a surge in enrollments since March. Enrollment at Coursera – an online platform that offers MOOCs, has skyrocketed and was 640% higher from mid-March to mid-April than during the same period last year, growing from 1.6 to 10.3 million. The surge was driven in part by giving free catalog access for 3,800 courses to their university partners. Enrollment at Udemy – another MOOC provider – was up over 400% between February and March. These surges correspond to lock downs across the world as the pandemic started to rage. As an astronomy professor who teaches and studies MOOCs, I believe there will be a continued shift toward these types of courses as the pandemic forces educators and students alike to rethink the risks associated with in-person...

‘Telepresence’ can help bring advanced courses to schools that don’t offer them

The big idea In schools where students want to take an advanced course that the school doesn’t offer, the telepresence model, which enables students in one school to use videoconferencing to take a course offered at another school, is an effective alternative that can keep students learning and engaged. To reach this conclusion, which we published in a recent study, we looked at the use of the telepresence model at the public school system in Milwaukee. Beyond videoconferencing equipment, the telepresence model uses smartboards, an online learning platform, and video and text chat to bring students from schools throughout the city together into a virtual classroom. Why it matters Using telepresence enables schools to offer students advanced courses they wouldn’t otherwise be able to take....