That makes it a most precious “app” today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. And yet, we don’t seem to value questioning as much as we should.
Here are some suggestions (based on input from question-friendly teachers, schools, programs, and organizations) on how to encourage more questioning in the classroom and hopefully, beyond it.
Teachers, too, are embracing mobile personal technologies in order to improve their teaching methods, including offering online audio or video recordings of lectures, communicating with students and sharing course materials online.
One concern with technology in the classroom (cited by half of the students) is the fact that technology can sometimes be distracting. However, two thirds of them feel that technology helps them overcome the barriers imposed by large class sizes and still maintain personal contact with professors and teaching assistants.
Administrators in universities used to be people who would support academics in their role. Now it feels increasingly as if the administrative machine is, not only creating more work for themselves (under the guise of quality monitoring) but also more work for people who entered academia.
I am afraid that this paper trail, which is based on the mentality of "evaluate everything that moves," does not prove anything. It is a simulacrum of quality measuring rather than a real encouragement of a culture of quality, originality and excellence.
Where is all this going? Research, imagination, reflection and academic freedom are giving way to a generation that tries to measure and evaluate what it cannot understand.
Suddenly, as you may have noticed, millennials are everywhere. Not that this group of people born after 1980 and before 2000 — a giant cohort now estimated to number at least 80 million Americans, more than the baby boom generation — was ever invisible.
What’s changed is their status. Coddled and helicoptered, catered to by 24-hour TV cable networks, fussed over by marketers and college recruiters, dissected by psychologists, demographers and trend-spotters, the millennial generation has come fully into its own.
Why this microscopic attention paid to a generation whose oldest members are only now entering the prime of their adult lives? One answer is that millennials, the first people to come of age in the 21st century, with its dizzying rate of technological change, have been forced to invent new ways of navigating it.
Out of all the students who enroll in a MOOC, only about 5 percent complete the course and receive a certificate of accomplishment. This statistic is often cited as evidence that MOOCs are fatally flawed and offer little educational value to most students.
Yet more than 80 percent of students who fill out a post-course survey say they met their primary objective. How do we reconcile these two facts?
Focusing on the tiny fraction of students who complete a MOOC is misguided. The more important number is the 60 percent engagement rate. Students may not finish a MOOC with a certificate of accomplishment, but the courses nonetheless meet the educational goals of millions.
Palabras Clave: Educación en línea.