Paul Musgrave  🎄 🎁 ☃️Varmennettu tili

7. Educational technology is worthless without universal access

8. Too few people understand that tuition isn’t the cost of instruction—at good schools, tuition is a loss leader

9. Pandemic has both mainstreamed and stigmatized online learning

10. Teaching is really hard and lecturing is the easy part

11. I don’t blame a single adjunct ever for using provided course slides

12. More profs should read up on ethnographies of student life; we need more ethnographies of student life

13. An hour lecture is four times easier than a 15-minute recorded class

14. Mostly students mostly want to do good work and mostly grades are unhelpful

15. There’s an immense paradox of choice for having too much freedom in charting ones way through a curriculum

16. Employers mostly want highly technical skills or general skills, and college isn’t well set up to do the latter

17. Students should rarely take overloads and should focus on getting more out of them

18. The ratio of faculty to course designers should be about 20:1

19. Portfolio-based assessment is the best and it’s hugely difficult to deliver with economical course sizes

20. Unsurprising but: student loans were a mistake past a certain point and we are way past that

21. Corny jokes are good because anything risky may be harmful to students or faculty

22. Many open resources aren’t as good as textbooks or other closed ones and that’s a structural condition

23. Making learning difficult requires risks and sometimes classes don’t pan out, and that’s okay

24. The first couple of years of a major should be very basic skills building and then you move harder to content

25. Weak foundations in reading are the causes of many problems we blame on writing instruction

26. We actually need “reading across the curriculum” instruction

27. Completion rates are an absolute scandal and administrators should have the power to force faculty to teach courses to keep students on a 4-year course

28. Yes I’ve heard about places where degree requirements couldn’t be fulfilled in 4 years because of faculty unavailability

29. The cultural divide between largely ex nerd faculties and largely non nerd students is more important than any partisan divide

30. IR specific: the paradigm debates are uninteresting and only make sense after students get to know the world—teach real theory before meta theory

31. For students anything that has a publication date of more than two years ago is impossibly old—consider just churning these

32. There’s a huge unmet need for 5-page literature reviews written at an undergrad level for American politics—we don’t need more “Monkey Cage” pieces but more Foreign Affairs-length pieces

33. It’s actually bad that political science undergrads are not consistently trained to read research in their field

34. But whaddaya going to do when the first few years of a degree have to cover the very basics?

35. Cheating is bad, but really it is

36. We could design courses that would be all but impossible to cheat in and actually there’s some blame on institutions there