The role of the classroom in higher education is changing, and "massively open online courses" (MOOCs) are leading the way.
How will extending high-quality science education to more people change how research is done? Will MOOCs lead to more fact-based discussions of controversial scientific topics like climate change and genetically modified organisms? Will the "flipped classroom" enable schools to rein in the spiraling cost of higher education and train more scientists? Join Relly Brandman of Coursera, writer Keith E. Grant, and Stanford professor Kristin Sainani for a discussion of these questions and more at this month's SOBA.
Relly Brandman is a senior member of the Course Operations team at Coursera. She works with universities all over the world to produce high-impact and engaging classes. Before coming to Coursera, Relly got her PhD at Stanford University as part of the Folding@Home team and did her postdoctoral studies at UCSF building computational models of critical Tuberculosis enzymes. She has many years of teaching experience in chemistry and computational biology, including hands-on workshops and coaching teachers. She is excited about her new adventure being part of a team bringing free, high quality education to anybody with an internet connection.
Keith Eric Grant
Keith Eric Grant (PhD, Applied Science, U.C. Davis) spent several decades as a computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). As part of the Atmospheric Sciences Division, he helped develop aerosol and radiative-transfer models for atmospheric chemistry and climate assessments. He also worked with the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) in developing the SUNDIALS suite of massively parallel numerical solvers. Post LLNL, his focus is on writing about atmospheric science and mathematical biology. In his spare time, he is both a hiker and instructor of massage therapy.
Kristin Sainani (née Cobb) is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University and also a health and science writer. After receiving an MS in statistics and PhD in epidemiology from Stanford University, she studied science writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has taught statistics and writing at Stanford for a decade. She also writes about science for a range of audiences. Her stories appear in: Stanford magazine, Stanford Medicine magazine, and Biomedical Computation Review. She authors the health column Body News forAllure magazine. She is also the statistical editor for the journal Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and she authors a statistics column, Statistically Speaking, for the journal PM&R. She recently taught her first MOOC, Writing in the Sciences, on Coursera.