E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Earlier this week Joshua Kim published a blog about 5 ways online teaching benefits residential learning. His 5 ways are:

1. A Chance to Rethink What Should Happen In the Physical Classroom
2. An Opportunity to Introduce Learning Theory and Pedagogical Research
3. Exposure to a Team Approach for Course Design
4. An Easier Transition to Blended Learning
5. Online Courses Help Make Teaching Strategies Visible to Educators and Students

These 5 ways are also true for my university. We have seen with a couple MOOCs that is started a complete change of the regular bachelor programme.

A good example is our mooc pre-university calculus. This course ran this summer with 27.000 students. The group that created the MOOC has also started a new programme (article in Dutch) to change the math education for all bachelor programmes. And they created a new website math-explained.tudelft.nl to make their video widely available for any student, but also for other teachers to include in their courses as reference material. And we got confirmation from other teachers that they use the content in their courses.

What we are further investigation is what the impact is on the pass rates for math in the first year. Traditionally the math courses are a hurdle for many students in passing the first year. In the survey the students really appreciated the course as is shown in the wordle above, where student were asked to give a one-word description.