4 mini polemics about student engagement and online teaching: can you change my mind?

Dr. Martin Compton – Arena Centre for research-based education

In the video below (9m38s) I present four interrelated arguments about teaching online. In my view these represent four of the biggest and ongoing debates about online teaching in terms of lecturer agency. They are, in other words, things we can all do something about, if we agree there is a need to change practices. These provocations are designed to challenge thinking and stimulate debate. I start with the ‘change my mind’ challenge because I am aware that I am as likely as anyone to have biases moulded by my experiences and disciplinary expertise. After the video is a link to the results of a Mentimeter poll showing a range of responses to these arguments when I initially posted them.

Please note: The video contains frequent ‘quick cuts’. If you prefer a simple, talking head version, please use this link. Transcript is available here. 

POLL NOW CLOSED
To see all other responses to the poll please see below:

Referred to in argument 2: Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50).

For a longer argument on video length by me, see this post on ALT blog.