Understanding Faculty’s Lived Experiences in an Increasingly Digitized World Tiffany Wong Although universities and their faculty design courses for periodic learning, the “new learning society”, an increasingly diverse, mobile population is inexorably shifting to a model of continuous, self-directed, lifelong learning. Hence, the effective instructional practices that emerge through the role of the MOOC instructor have lasting value, whether the trend of MOOCs endures, or not. Understanding faculty experiences can inform online teaching as well as facilitate the success of MOOCs and other online offerings as an educational format within and beyond the university, and help both faculty and learners thrive in a new learning society. As part of a larger study, this paper reports on the impact of online teaching on instructors’ pedagogical approaches. A key finding is that instructors improved their residential teaching by incorporating MOOC material into their courses; online format also forced instructors to think of both their subject matter and the presentation of their content in better and more inclusive ways.
A New Curriculum for an Uncertain Future Jackeline Bucio, Guadalupe Vadillo Students must be able to discover problems and face those that are ill-defined, to build innovative solutions, to analyze situations using non-traditional viewpoints and to happily and effectively respond to changing restrictions. This work presents the curricular redesign process of Mexico's national university virtual high school. The program is aimed at building the fundamental cultural basis that is expected from this educational level. The authors expect its contents, structure and learning activities to constitute a two-year training for students to feel comfortable and be productive while facing uncertain environments. The redesign process involved a diagnosis, the definition of design restrictions and general structure, and the development of an educational social network to socialize and improve the syllabi, as well as an intelligent tutoring system that will support teachers’ work.
