One of the major goals of science and technology education today is to promote students' active learning as a way to improve students' conceptual understanding and thinking skills. Although there is clear evidence for the benefits of active learning, most lecturers in higher education still adhere to traditional teaching methods. This research seeks to identify the characteristic attitudes of "active instructors" towards active learning and discerning a distinction between these attitudes and those of the remaining instructors. This study examined the attitudes of 153 lecturers in three higher education institutions in Israel. The research tool was an attitude questionnaire developed specially for this study on the basis of the experience of 7 "active instructors" exposing the process of change they had undergone moving from traditional teaching to more active instruction. An analysis of these interviews provided the basis for characterizing the attitudes of "active instructors" and subsequently for the development of the research questionnaire. On the basis of a literature review and an examination of the attitudes of the "active instructors," a content analysis was undertaken in which the attitudes were grouped into six key domains that can characterize the tendency of a lecturer to adopt active teaching. The findings reveal that in all these 6 domains there were significant differences between the attitudes of "active instructors" and their colleagues. This diagnostic tool can supply crucial information to the college and universities directors when planning supportive steps toward advancing active learning in their institutions.
Higher education institutions face conflicting challenges; they must equip students with up-to-date knowledge in fields in which knowledge is constantly being renewed, while they also need to guide students to examine reality through broad-based observation and consider different scientific disciplines. They operate within different constrictions such as: learning program boundaries, budgetary constrictions, and lack of accessibility to experts in different areas, and the range of courses offered to students is limited. To cope with these constrictions, Ort Braude Academic College of Engineering opened an experimental program. As part of this program, students were allowed to study MOOC courses under the college’s supervision, and were eligible for accreditation if they completed the courses successfully. Only 15 out of the 600 students offered the program, registered for these courses. Only seven were accepted for the program. This paper describes the background for the college’s decision, the registration process and supervision of students, detailing students’ challenges and achievements in the MOOC courses. Students who completed the MOOC courses reported that they enjoyed meaningful learning, requiring serious efforts in comparison to the courses that the MOOC courses replaced. Given this positive feedback by the students, it was decided to continue with the experiment.
The paper investigates difficulties involved in integrating online courses in academic colleges. Despite their growing prevalence in Israel and worldwide there are still no online courses offered as part of the learning process in many colleges. In order to identify factors for this phenomenon, a study was conducted to investigate the attitudes of 137 lecturers in an academic college concerning online courses. A questionnaire was employed to examine attitudes in four areas: cognizance of the online courses, willingness to teach these courses, influence of online courses on the college's reputation and teaching methods in online courses. The study identified four sources of reluctance among college instructors to teach in these courses: lack of knowledge concerning teaching methods, fear of a heavy work burden, concern that students' achievements might fall and impairment of the college's reputation. Since there is desire to integrate online courses in academic colleges, it is recommended that an online pedagogy support centre should be opened in these colleges, and that colleges should consider making it mandatory for students to take at least one compulsory online course during their degree course.
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