I wish I could say it was a NoPP:
"Professors take lessons from online teaching; Researchers mine a trove of data from courses offered free on Web" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff, June 09, 2013
CAMBRIDGE — MOOCs, the new species of free classes prestigious universities are offering to students around the world. As educators debate what the classes mean for the future of traditional universities, one thing is clear — they provide a vast laboratory to study learning, using a trail of electronic data to examine what resources or study habits best help students, whether they take courses online or in traditional classrooms....
The data from just one online class spawned multiple research papers?
And, um, it's going to the government, right? This is just another surveillance program.
Some researchers caution, however, that more data do not automatically mean better results. In an online class with diverse students from around the world, there is a danger of misunderstanding who is learning what.
I never thought online was true education. Something about interacting with others in a classroom that seems intricately part of an education to me.
Perhaps students who pick up the material easily already have a strong background in the field. Maybe someone who appears to spend a long time looking at a certain resource has the screen open while doing something else, said Isaac Chuang, another MIT professor studying MOOCs
“As in any well-designed experiment, there must be the possibility of failure,” Chuang said. Otherwise, “you’re not pushing the envelope enough.”
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Pedro Brito, a freshman from Puerto Rico, said the class cured him of his dread of physics. The online material, together with the abundance of time at the blackboard, helped him learn to grapple with the underlying concepts instead of blindly guessing at the right formula to plug in.
“Sometimes I thank God that I failed” the intro class, he said. “Being in this class . . . I actually learned how to love physics.’’
I didn't love finding out about physics because that was when I realized the WTC towers couldn't have fallen like the government claims they did.
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