<p>The models stress online assessment that provides immediate feedback to instructors. Administrators can monitor tests given to students before the course redesign and after to measure their subject knowledge.</p> <p>The idea, says Carol A. Twigg, president and chief executive of NCAT, is to structure courses so that both student and instructor time is best used.</p>

NCAT has identified several <a href="http://www.center.rpi.edu/PlanRes/R2R_ModCrsRed.htm" target="_blank">redesign models</a>, all of which adhere to the principle that students need more than just traditional lectures.

100 percent of incoming liberal arts freshmen surveyed use online sources, most think it’s easy to know when to document a source but nearly half couldn’t determine when one was required

As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits <i>all</i> students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires <i>all</i> young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

<p><cite><b> WHAT THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS AND OF THE PARTICULAR SUBJECT CAN OFFER US: </b></cite> </p><ul> <li>A human vision of science and of mathematics: not just truths, methods, techniques coming from nowhere, not just facts and skills without soul, without history, but the results of the efforts of persons motivated by deep interest and passion; not as godlike science, but human and so incomplete and fallible; the human side of the great discoveries and discoverers.</li> <p></p><li>A frame in which all elements appear in their right place: not facts centuries apart in their origin presented together in the same bag without a single remark, but explorations in their own context and with their own motivation; past fashions in order to be able to understand present fashions; the deep connections along time of the different leitmotivs of the mathematical symphony.</li> <p></p><li>A dynamical vision of the evolution of mathematics: the motivation and driving forces at the roots of the ideas and methods of the subject; the primordial creativity around each particular subject, its genesis and its progress</li></ul>

<p>The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) <em>7 Things You Should Know About...</em> series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:</p> <ul> <li>What it is</li> <li>How it works</li> <li>Where it is going</li> <li>Why it matters to teaching and learning</li></ul>

They focus group energy, they permit real-time interaction (which can help develop group cohesion, especially for those less familiar with media-based learning) and, most importantly, they provide a familiar instructional environment that mimic many positive features found in the traditional classroom environment (i.e., synchronicity, verbal rather than text-based interaction, instructor presence, whiteboard presentation facilities, hand-raising for turn-taking, public and private messaging capabilities).

The CREST+ model, a model for writing effective online discussion questions, covers the cognitive nature of the question, the reading basis, any experiential possibility, style and type of question, and finally ways to structure a good question.&nbsp; This model encourages students to participate in online forum discussions, provides a template for new online faculty to use in creating effective discussion questions, and promotes a higher level processing of the material.

The CREST+ model covers the cognitive nature of the question [C], the reading basis [R], any experiential [E] possibility, style and type of question [ST] , and finally ways to structure a good question [+].&nbsp;

The Scholar360 Network Learning Environment integrates the best features of a learning management system with the best features of a social network. Instructors can teach online courses, dialog with students via discussion boards and blogs, manage automated tests, lessons and grading. Students can share files, build an eportfolio, blog, build a peer and mentor network.

Online spaces are blurring, as universities that podcast and text their students have shown. The Jisc project manager, Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: "Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don't want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information."

And so, the challenge is that when I try to divest myself of my teacherly voice I need to remember that this process is not about losing the voice of the expert but about losing the voice of the traditional authoritarian teacher who enters the classroom as an official persona armed with a pre-defined set of goals and very specific lesson plans for his students to follow. It is about giving the students the freedom to engage with ideas that they find relevant and interesting, not about dictating every step of their learning process.

I believe that it is important to lose the authoritarian voice, the controlling voice, but not the voice of an expert who chose to teach because of his passion for the subject. The students need to see that the instructor is someone who lives and breathes whatever it is that they’re studying, that they have in their midst someone who has a wealth of expertise.

As it turned out, this was one of the best courses, online or onsite, I have ever taught. Not only did I witness enormous engagement among almost all of the students, but the level of learning was much higher than in previous years.

The feedback from the students on the course was very positive, better than I had received for the onsite course in previous years. One of my favorite written student comments was, "… I don't know how this course could be taught as effectively in the classroom."