Category Archives: Teaching

Reason #9 to enroll in 207x

Continuing my series on the top 10 reasons to enroll in Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), which officially begins on May 6th…. Previous entries: #10 Origin stories are captivating. Scientific origin stories can be unifying. Reason #9 – It … Continue reading

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Reason #10 to enroll in 207x

With the re-launch of Anth 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution) just 10 days away, I wanted to highlight some of the reasons you should consider enrolling in the course. Each day between now and May 6th, the start date for … Continue reading

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Uniformitarianism and the stratigraphic profiles of academia

One of the great challenges in paleoanthropological field work is understanding the sequence of events that led to the accumulation of materials at a site. How did these sediments get here? What agents led to the assemblage of fossils that … Continue reading

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And then we came to the end, a few post #MOOC musings

This past semester was…hectic. I could add many other adjectives with differing connotations to that sentence, but needless to say, teaching Wellesley’s first MOOC course, coupled with ordinary professional obligations, coupled with a lot of life, coupled with a few … Continue reading

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207x snapshot #2 : Education level

Another quick snapshot of the student body in 207x. Again, these data are not quite complete, as they are missing ~2000 “late” enrollees. Nevertheless it is an interesting portrait. This is a chart showing the highest level of education achieved … Continue reading

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MOOCs: Teaching as social action

Teaching is a social action. The interaction within a class between students, the connection between teacher and students, the context in which such conversations take place…all of these are part of the social reality that reflects teaching. One of the … Continue reading

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Me talking about MOOCs, liberal arts education, and 207x

I gave a talk last week on campus about my course, the new WellesleyX initiative, and the relationship between MOOCs and a traditional liberal arts education. You can watch a complete cut of the video here.

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207x snapshot: Year of birth

I will be doing a series of quick snapshots of my MOOC, 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), throughout the semester. I wanted to begin with one showing the self-reported year of birth of the enrolled students. This is actually missing … Continue reading

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The minimum evidence necessary to demonstrate evolution

Each week in Wellesley 207x I will be providing my students with a “thought question for the weekend” related to that week’s course content. Students are invited to provide their responses on the discussion forums. These responses are not graded, … Continue reading

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A worldwide audience

I promise to not write solely about my EdX course, but…it is live as of this morning. And in the first three hours of being live, we have had students posting in the discussion forum from every continent outside of … Continue reading

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