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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

MOOCs and Pedagogy: Teacher-Centered, Student-Centered, and Hybrids | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

MOOCs and Pedagogy: Teacher-Centered, Student-Centered, and Hybrids | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice


MOOCs and Pedagogy: Teacher-Centered, Student-Centered, and Hybrids

In writing about all of the hype surrounding MOOCs, I saw this photo entitled “University Classroom of the Future.”

From instructional television in the 1950s through updated versions of  “distance education, “a professor professing in front of a camera is familiar and surely will dominate many of the newly established platforms (e.g., Coursera, Udacity, edX). Whether it will be the “University Classroom of the Future,” I cannot say for sure. But the photo makes the professor front and center in teaching content and skills.
The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in