MOOCs Could Help 2-Year Colleges and Their Students, Says Bill Gates – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

• MOOCs Could Help 2-Year Colleges and Their Students, Says Bill Gates – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  MOOCs and the flipped model could increase learning and student retention free up instructor time to focus on career/professional development.

  tags: education learning college higher education undergraduate employment degrees mooc

  • But a relatively new model, which "flips" homework and classwork by incorporating outsourced lectures, could help struggling students and make colleges more efficient, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told a packed gathering of community-college leaders here on Wednesday.

  • eriment with flipped classrooms and other techniques for integrating technology into their teaching.

  • He has done so many times. "For a dropout, I’ve taken a lot of courses," he said.

  • The flipped MOOC is a variation of the flipped-classroom concept, in which instructors assign videotaped lectures to students, who then do what once was considered homework in class.

  • As MOOC lectures evolve, the average classroom professor will have a hard time competing, and the traditional lecture will seem antiquated, Mr. Gates suggested.

  • "Of course it’s quite controversial, what software can take over, but once you get a great pool of lectures out there that incorporate problem solving and drill practice, this frees up time" for more-personalized instruction in the classroom, Mr. Gates said.

  • With more work done at home and online, students could spend less time on campuses, freeing up classroom space to accommodate more students, he said.

  • They can work at their own pace, focusing on specific topics rather than having to move in lock step through a remedial-math sequence with students who might be having trouble with other parts.

  • Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, said students could spend less time on the campus if they were enrolled in courses that incorporated free online content.

  • Failure rates have dropped in the flipped classes that edX has piloted at colleges, Rebecca Petersen, director of research at edX, told the group.

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