Thanks for sharing your post! I really like your quote. After reading your post I start to think what I think Contemporary Pedagogy should be. It is a million dollar question! I second that student-centered learning could be a great direction.

Thank you for sharing your story. I think the definition of “good student” is different between countries. In Asia, a good student means he/her has a high score in academic. He/her doesn’t need to follow the teacher’s order. In my personal experience, the outstanding students usually also make our teacher headache. But as long as the student maintains his/her academic status, we consider that student is a good student.

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Online learning seems to provide all the benefits and conveniences. However, we still need to aware the human nature. Online learning could provide the most benefits for these self-motive students but could be a disaster for ordinary students. It just like people have a gym membership but never go to the gym. Last year, we spent some money on the online course subscription. During subscription, everyone can take any online courses. At the end of the year, we see the usage report. Only one-third of people took the course (didn’t check if they actually finish the course or not), the rest of people didn’t even register a single course.

For a research university, they care research and grant more important than teaching. No matter if the professor gets tenured or not. So there are lecturer and adjunct positions. You can’t expect a people to improve a thing which their manager does not care less. Also, if a professor wants to jump to another university, which one takes the most weight in the CV? 1. Research/grant 2. Teach 3. Service. The answer is very clear.

I am so excited to see that New York University’s School of Medicine moved toward a tuition-free policy. The top ranking university would like to have this is a very big and important step! I hope more and more Universities in different fields could provide similar steps.

I like the graph! My past research project was related to OER. We built a computing educational portal site http://computingportal.org/ to gather all the open education resources from multiple places on the Internet. Ensemble is a NSF funded project and a distributed portal for computing education. This portal provides access to a broad range of existing educational resources for computing while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes.

People can sleep or daydream during class without using a device. A student can read magazine or comic in class if he wants. People can chat, eat, write a note to friends in class if they feel bored in class. There are tons of ways to distract in class if they intend to do. Yes, new technologies make us easy to be distracted. But I think it totally depends on students’ attitude to the class, not the techniques.

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We can do different levels of multitasking. For example, I can comment on your blog while listening to music at ease. I take note during class. My wife can cook while watching TV. Ever saw a sign language interpretation on Live TV? There are a lot of examples shows that we can do multitasking. It also can be trained but depends on how much your brain can consume on these tasks. For example, I can’t write a paper while listening to music. It is just my 2 cents.

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Your post reminded me to wonder how the gifted program teacher teach a class full of genius? In my country, the top one high school has a gifted program, the students there is top among top students in the whole country with IQ over 140 or more. I don’t know what kind of teacher been qualify and can survival among these genius students…

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Thanks for sharing this post with the bullet point. I wonder how to archive to fulfill each individual students’ needs. It could be done in a graduate class witch maybe around 10-15 people. However, in the undergraduate class, the number could be 50-100, how can a teacher t do that in practical? I am curious about that.

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