education

YouTube EDU is news to me. I'm still wondering how I missed it—it’s pretty much like TV channels and classrooms right on the funny-videos site! So I took a good look, and here are the channels I liked best.

PowerPoint has been used, abused, and used again. Millions of people have made, viewed, and analysed presentations, so there’s a lot of existing wisdom about best practices. Also, PowerPoint is being increasingly used in e-learning development. So here's a look at what PowerPoint practices are applicable to courseware development.

#1: Questions to the audience

Reading and listening are at the foundation of most learning. While we don’t need to be taught how to listen well, many of us read suboptimally. We might spend more time reading something than we should, or maybe we can’t recall enough. Or, a potentially interesting passage might seem boring.

Here are a few “best practices” of reading in general: How to comprehend and retain more from a reading session.

Standardised tests, such as the SAT and GRE, are often criticised for not doing a good job at measuring what they are supposed to. Critics question the accuracy of the evaluations themselves, and also what the tests are supposed to achieve (namely, predicting academic performance in college or graduate school).

The issues are broad-ranging:

What makes traditional, pre-1990s books so different from today’s popular books and e-books? To generalise somewhat, the presentation differs in almost every way: Paragraph structure, bulleted lists, visual elements, boxed islands of information, and so forth.