This report examines the emergence of the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) and its impact on business schools. Business schools provide a bundle of benefits to students, only one of which is learning specific academic subjects. The focal technology relevant to business schools is not the MOOC but rather a technology embedded within the MOOC — chunked
asynchronous video paired with adaptive testing, a technology we call “SuperText.” The SuperText technology opens up at least three pathways for business schools. Via one pathway, SuperText allows institutions to serve more students better and/or more efficiently.
Via a second pathway, institutions can serve existing students with fewer faculty members. Along a third pathway, the functions of a business school are unbundled and business schools as we know them are substantially displaced by alternatives. These pathways can be thought of as a menu of options for a business school contemplating how to use the new technologies.
Alternatively, these pathways are scenarios that could unfold with or without the active participation of an institution. Although our focus is on business schools, we believe the analysis is relevant to higher education more generally.
This study was a phenomenological study examining the experiences of faculty in an online learning environment in order to identify the factors that could produce job burnout and stress in master’s programs in education. The challenges and related stress-producing factors were also explored to identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in the online teaching environment. The study’s insights and findings are based on perspectives from online faculty who have been teaching in the modality for three or more years. These findings may be useful to stakeholders such as administrators, faculty mentors, faculty trainers, and faculty interested in employment in the modality so that identifiable and realistic criteria may be available upon which to base future hiring standards, employment practices, training, and decisions about teaching online. Insights about procedures and practices have been identified that may be effective in helping to develop initial training programs, faculty mentor supports, administrative decisions, and on-going faculty training. Based upon the findings, institutional leaders have information that could help identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in an online teaching environment. Institutions and administration can seek out and recruit the best possible online faculty who have the necessary skills, abilities, and characteristics required in this modality rather than hiring based merely upon academic credentials that would fail to identify specific attributes necessary for online teaching. Finally, those specific characteristics can then be applied to alleviate job burnout challenges online faculty would experience. The study will help institutional leaders (a) identify faculty earlier who will be better suited to the modality; (b) identify how to offer relevant, on-going faculty supports and training practices; and
(c) prevent online faculty job burnout.
Online writing resources have the potential to improve writing instruction for university students, particularly in large classes where frequent writing assignments are often not possible. The Assignment Planner (AP) is an online resource created by the Writing Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University and is freely available to all students through the Writing Centre website. The AP guides students through the process of researching and writing an academic paper. It projects a timeline for each paper and breaks down the research and writing process into 11 steps. Our research project was designed to examine whether integrating use of the AP into large classes has benefits for students and/or professors.
In this quasi-experimental research project, four large first-year classes and one fourth-year seminar class were studied. The first-year classes were randomly assigned to either a control condition (no classroom integration) or intervention condition (explicit integration of the AP into the classroom). The fourth-year seminar class, in which integration of the AP was already underway, was a post hoc addition to the study. Data collection included frequency counts of students’ online access to the AP, student in-class surveys, student writing marks and professor interviews.
I am a Research Assistant on a project entitled Writing Instruction Using an Online Assignment Planner. I am here to invite you to participate in this study. This study is designed to assess how teachers and students use the Assignment Planner in large classes