Students who are the first in their family to pursue a college education face unique challenges; a problem even more prevalent among minority students. Black, Hispanic and Native American populations have lower rates of college retention and degree completion than white and Asian students. The problem is exacerbated by traditional, first-year college courses that are intense, lecture-focused and unconnected with each other.
The nation of Brazil is underrepresented in the curricula of American public schools; this despite Brazil’s status as the world’s third most populous democracy, with nearly 230 million citizens; more territory than the continental U.S., and an economy more robust than those of Canada and Russia. Brazil’s national language is found on four continents, making Portuguese one of the 10 most widely spoken languages.
Children today are aware of environmental problems in their communities and are often eager to help work toward solutions. Students get excited about science when they can solve real-world problems and see connections between the concepts they learn in school and the world around them. Yet most elementary curricula focus more on facts than problem-solving skills.
With the dramatic increase in the popularity of online learning, video lectures have become the predominant content-delivery format for the majority of online courses, including MOOCs — massively open online courses. Today’s technologies enable a variety of ways of creating videos: “talking hands,” embedded simulations and branching link options are three examples. However, despite these new functions, most existing learning videos are surprisingly uniform in format: a monologue style of lecture.