Some education thoughts of the week

It was a busy week and today I was in three different meetings about teaching-learning. The first was about electronic study guides and we discussed a number of issues:

• pdf-paper-behind-glass type electronic guides vs. full-scale interactive electronic guides, 
• what do students need, 
• what can lecturers provide, 
• it may help to go green and save paper, but will it save money, and
• do we have the IT infrastructure? 

All of these are relevant issues, but for me the key is to get more lecturers to buy into the blended-learning model. If you are not flipping your classroom, an electronic guide will just be something that you are forced to developed (hopefully using some template!) and it won't be used properly for learning.

In the School we had a nice session on assessment, talking specifically about essay questions and papers and the memo's and marking rubrics for those. I learned that I have to go and have a look at Bloom's taxonomy and the action verbs again. A big word of thanks to Dr Inge Venter of Academic Support Services for her time.

Finally I also started playing with Quizlet. I hope that the first years will start using it and create a resource for studying the basic concepts of introductory Economics. Have a look at these (in Afrikaans):