muraPOI: December 3, 2012

As an MIT student, should I go to lecture?: Neel Hajare, MIT ’12 responds:

I only go to lecture if I’m going to be as engaged and entertained as I would be while watching a good movie or TV show.

Back when I was in college, I went to 99% of my classes regardless of the skills of my professor. Whether those classes had a lecturer never made eye contact with anyone in the class–looking out over the top of all the students or would consistently make mathematical errors about 20-30 minutes into class, I nearly always attended in class*.

But today is much different than the early 1990s. Today, I think we have much better uses of class time than information dissemination–now if I could only convince more faculty to use some of these “new” methods of the “flipped classroom”, active learning, and so on.

(*Really, both of those are true stories. One was fluid dynamics the other heat transfer. Those experiences probably helped cement my interests in being a “design” guy not a “thermo/heat transfer” guy.

(Quora, October 2, 2012)

5 ways online education can keep its students honest: A nice roundup of 5 methods: remote live proctoring, remote web proctoring, browser lockdowns, keystroke pattern recognition software, plagiarism detectors.

In the class I coordinated in Spring 2012, we used remote live proctoring via WebEx. Simple, but effective enough for this class.

(Google Alerts, November 18, 2012)