Curating the EdSurge Guides to Education

March 1, 2019

The EdSurge series of Guides on trends in education – supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – are great resources for educators and tech providers, and they focus on new pedagogy trends for today’s campuses , starting with changing needs of students, staff, and faculty.

 

“It’s popular these days to complain that college teaching hasn’t changed in hundreds of years,” writes Jeffrey R. Young in the online portal to the EdSurge Guides. “Sure, it’s possible to find some professors on any campus holding yellowed lecture notes, or clinging to dusty chalk,” says Young. “But the reality is that the internet and digital technologies have already brought profound changes to instructional styles and tools in higher education. So what are the new teaching approaches catching on at today’s campuses? And what are the broader cultural changes around college teaching?”

 

The new online resource curates the Guides in the series, with links. Highlights of Guides:

 

• More professors are shifting from textbooks to OER. In the past year, the percentage of faculty assigning open educational materials (OER) has doubled compared to last year.

 

• Flipped classrooms seem to be growing exponentially. Many scholarly articles are published each year about “flipping” instruction, meaning that traditional lecture-style material is delivered before class (often using videos) so that classroom time can be used for discussion and other more active learning. And research on the topic is growing exponentially.

 

• More professors are looking to experts to help them teach. One example is the steady rise in colleges that are hiring instructional designers to advise on improving courses, especially when building online offerings. A growing number of professors and campus leaders are rethinking other spaces on campus and online to improve teachable moments. Among the examples: experiments with putting office hours online to get students to show up, and bringing virtual reality to science labs to broaden what students could explore there.

 

• Colleges are still struggling to find the best fit for online education. A look at what lessons can be learned from MOOCs, as well what research so far about which students online can best serve.

 

• What does it mean to teach an age of information overload and polarization?

 

 

Read EdSurge’s full report, and access all the Guides, by clicking here.