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Monday, January 23, 2006

Why, UD often wonders,

do Americans always have to go through the process of doing the stupid thing and then correcting the stupid thing, when they could avoid the stupid thing in the first place?


Headline in today's Chicago Trib:

MORE UNDERGRADS PLAYING HOOKY
WHEN CLASS NOTES GO ONLINE.
SOME PROFS PULLING MATERIALS
FROM THE WEB.

'"Too much online instruction is a bad thing," said Terre Allen, a communication studies scholar and director of a center that provides teaching advice to professors at California State University Long Beach.

This last term, Allen experimented with posting extensive lecture notes online for her undergraduate course, Language and Behavior. One goal was to relieve students of the burden of furiously scribbling notes, freeing them to focus on the lectures' substance.

Yet the result, Allen said, was that only about one-third of her 154 students showed up for most of the lectures. In the past, when Allen put less material online, 60 to 70 percent of students typically would attend.

This term, Allen won't put her lecture notes online.'
Posted at: 1/23/2006 10:00:00 AM