I think that undergraduate education at most universities is done very badly. There are far too many courses that consist of professors giving standard lectures to large classes with evaluations focused on "memorize and regurgitate" exams. Most courses pay no heed to student-centered learning even though there has been sound pedagogical research showing that student participation leads to better learning. Most courses and programs provide no "value-added" component that takes advantage of being physically located in an enriched scholarly environment. Most courses do not teach critical thinking.
Given the horrible status of most university courses, it's not surprising that they can be replaced by online courses where the student never needs to set foot on a university campus to get the same quality of education. This is not an endorsement of online courses, it's a comment on the poor quality of campus-based courses.
David B. Searls is an "independent consultant" who published an article in PLOS Computational Biology: An Online Bioinformatics Curriculum.
Read more »
Blog Archive
Popular Posts
-
Biology concepts – hydrogenosome, FeS cluster protein, loricifera, erythrocyte More than one way to skin a cat seems to be a newer versi...
-
As someone interested in linguistic recursion, I gotta join in... the below blog post has been getting a fair amount of attention around the...
-
Lab Times is a magazine that reports on news for life scientists in Europe. Their current issue (Sept. 14, 2011) has an "analysis&qu...
-
My next door neighbor used to be the chair of the Immunology Department but Immunology recently moved to another floor of this building. The...
-
Kevin O'Leary is one of those people who think that the world revolves around entrepreneurs and making money. He's well known in ...
-
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1905 "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis" Robert Koch ...
-
Halloween is a time when fear is invited. The rush of adrenaline in a controlled environment is life- affirming. Not much else to comment on...
-
Biology concepts – gravitropism, plastid, chloroplast, chromoplast, amyloplast, leucoplast, malaria parasite Believe it or not, the way plan...
-
Biology concepts – compartmentalization , organelle function , cellular biochemistry This chart represents a portion of the cellular reactio...
-
Biology concepts – pollination , single pollinator , co-evolution , co-divergence What’s bugging her, it’s supposed to be a party! Imagine t...