A Science “Reading List for Uncertain Times” Selection

“A must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the present and future of higher education.”
—Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Lower Ed

“A must-read for the education-invested as well as the education-interested.”
—Forbes

Proponents of massive online learning have promised that technology will radically accelerate learning and democratize education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. But a decade after the “year of the MOOC,” the promise of disruption seems premature.

In Failure to Disrupt, Justin Reich takes us on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, “intelligent tutors,” and other edtech platforms and delivers a sobering report card. Institutions and investors favor programs that scale up quickly at the expense of true innovation. Learning technologies—even those that are free—do little to combat the growing inequality in education. Technology is a phenomenal tool in the right hands, but no killer app will shortcut the hard road of institutional change.

“I’m not sure if Reich is as famous outside of learning science and online education circles as he is inside. He should be…Reading and talking about Failure to Disrupt should be a prerequisite for any big institutional learning technology initiatives coming out of COVID-19.”
—Inside Higher Ed

“The desire to educate students well using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as Justin Reich illustrates…many recent technologies that were expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant inequalities.”
—Science

Health Extension: Community-Based Healthcare and the Future of Cooperative Extension explores innovation in extension health programs, engaged scholarship promoting research-based information in communities, and the evaluation and documentation of community programs and their impacts. This volume provides land-grant and university-based colleagues up-to-date information on using the Cooperative Extension System (CES) for community engagement in healthcare while also familiarizing those outside CES and the academy with a roadmap for improvement. The contributions of a diverse array of scholars challenge the status quo in extension programs by characterizing the introspection, understanding, creativity, partnerships, and leadership that will be required to improve lives and communities  in the twenty-first century. This perspective underscores the role of CES as foundational to the future of Health Extension and offers an alternative to approaches that utilize the CES as a model without the accompanying advantages of history, community embeddedness, and sustainability.

As recently as 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) looked poised to revolutionize higher education, but in just a few years their flaws and problems have made them into a less relevant model. In More than a Moment, Steven D. Krause explores MOOCs and their continuing impact on distance learning in higher education, putting them in the context of technical innovations that have come before and those that will be part of the educational future.
 
Krause writes about his own experiences as a participant in several MOOCs and the experiences of faculty who developed and taught MOOCs. Contrary to many early claims from educational entrepreneurs, they were never entirely “new,” and MOOCs and their aftermath are still at the heart of the tensions between nonprofit universities and for-profit entities, particularly online program management firms, in delivering distance education.
 
While MOOCs are no longer a threat to education in the United States, they are part of the ongoing corporatization of education and remain part of conversations about experienced-based credit, corporate training, and open education. Presenting historical, student, teacher, and administrative perspectives, More than a Moment is a well-rounded treatment that will be of interest to academics and entrepreneurs interested in distance education, online pedagogy, online program management, and public-private partnerships in higher education.

A collection addressing the theory and practice of online and distance education.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the widespread adoption of distance and online learning in higher education, which has presented opportunities for large-scale, inclusive, flexible, and engaging learning. This volume, assembled by the University of London’s Centre for Online and Distance Education, addresses the practice and theory of online and distance education, building on knowledge and expertise developed in the university across nearly a century and a half. Contributors explore important principles and highlight successful practices in areas such as course design and pedagogy, online assessment, open education, inclusive practice, and enabling students' voices. Case studies illustrate prominent issues and approaches. Together, the chapters offer current and future leaders and practitioners a practical, productive, practice- and theory-informed account of the present and likely future state of online and distance higher education worldwide.
 

A Primer for Teaching Digital History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching digital history for the first time or for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as teachers who want to incorporate digital history into their history courses. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them.

Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?

Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.