Authors : Rubén Lijó , Global Training Coordinator at Hitachi Energy, Posdoctoral Researcher at Instituto para el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación en Comunicaciones (IDeTIC) / Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Eduardo Quevedo , Institute for Applied Microelectronics (IUMA) / Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; and José Juan Castro , Department […]
The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task. But this is not all that universities can do or should do. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even easier to reduce […]
In a recent entry, I provided a summary of Brian Caplan’s views (in his book The Case against Education ) about the main evils of our contemporary education system. In a nutshell, the main problem is, in the first place, that most of what is taught in schools and colleges is basically not learnt, or […]
It’s a pitty that Bryan Caplan’s extremely interesting book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money , published in 2018, has not deserved more careful attention in the public and permanent debate over education (see here an early review in Spanish by Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias). I […]
Online courses are rapidly expanding. They can reach more students and reduce drastically the costs of teaching. They are, thus, an attractive option for both students and schools. Being a recent development, there is still little research to assess their performance. A first group of studies used the method of randomly assigning students to an […]
November 25, 1858, was a very cold day in Concord, Massachusetts. It was then that Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond some frozen fish he had never seen before, which were “shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch”, as he wrote the following day. “Are they not a new species?” he […]
An innovative group of 30 international education professionals taught the first online microbiology course using Twitter, #microMOOCSEM, complete with lectures, videos, news, and more, with some classes reaching over 260,000 impressions and 3,700 retweets. Currently, most students are users of social networks like YouTube, Facebook or Twitter and have incorporated them, often unconsciously as powerful […]
Researchers do not know what influences have the stereotypical images of scientists, if any, on children’s perception of science. The most common technique for assessing children’s perceptions of scientists is the Draw-a-Scientist Test (DAST). David Wade Chambers firstly proposed it in 1983 , and its main aim was to identify at what age the stereotypic […]