Virtual Courses

HOD’s are looking into possibilities and will report on them.

Usman Mustafa: Strathclyde University has a REMOTE MBA program where they teach via distance learning. Perhaps we can run a collaborative program with them. Alternatively, I understand that all courses are Wharton are now available online. We might be able to create our own virtual program.

There is a recent report on major changes in Higher Education which are potential game-changers.

The report is entitled “The Avalanche is Coming” and is available on the internet. It is highly

recommended reading for all HOD’s as well as interested faculty. Here I will deal with only one

aspect, which is the MOOC – massive open online courses. Now that Wharton, MIT and other major

universities have put a lot of their regular courses online, it is essential that both our students and

teachers learn to use this resource effectively in teaching. There are two action items that can be

implemented quickly:

1. HOD’s should examine available online courses for direct use in our teaching. For high

quality courses equivalent to what we are currently teaching (one such is an Intermediate

Macroeconomics course) we should use these materials for the “inverted classroom”

approach. Here the student must watch lectures outside the class. In class the teachers job

is to evaluate understanding of the student, and offer discussions to guide them to deeper

understanding. One key problem at PIDE is that many of our researchers have never taught

courses, and do not feel comfortable with teaching because of lack of experience. The

inverted classroom offers a perfect solution to this problem, since the essence of teaching is

done by the online lectures, and the researcher provides a supplement.

2. Instead of full semester courses, a small module consisting of one or two weeks worth of

lectures may be adapted for use within any one of our regular courses. It would be useful

for students and teacher to acquire familiarity with this mode of teaching, which is the wave

of the future, without the semester long commitment required by option 1.

3. After some experience is gained, we can design our own MOOC’s which are more in line

with our educational goals. I have already prepared a short course of ten lectures on

Introductory Statistics which is designed to be an MOOC. I plan to use it for teaching at PIDE

in the near future. Similarly, other teachers will be encouraged to develop such courses, so

we can move to the forefront of current pedagogical paradigms.