A virtual analysis
A new analysis of four blended-format courses taught last fall offers practical guidance for faculty members interested in fresh pedagogical approaches. The pilot study led by the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and released today after months of checks and balances showed that students responded most to lesson structure and execution, placed a premium on person-to-person interaction, and found redundancies between in-class and online instruction. A related report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE) that focused on a single undergraduate history course also covered in the Bok study had similar findings. The Bok study analyzed student responses to four undergraduate General Education courses taught in the fall of 2013 that integrated online components into the classroom: “The Einstein Revolution,” “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization,” “China,” and “Science and Cooking.” Each course had run previously in a residential format and some had been offered fully online via edX,...