The evolution of online course development at McMaster Continuing Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This reflective piece charts the evolution of McMaster’s Continuing Education online course development team, with the aim of drawing out a series of broader lessons about the changing nature of teaching and learning in the digital domain. The first lesson is the importance of a professed commitment to teaching and learning innovation and attendant instructor development and support with a dedicated staff of digital learning experts. Second is the necessity of remaining nimbly responsive in the face of a rapidly evolving higher education (and wider societal) landscape, to ensure that the full potential of both instructors and learners can be continually realized in an environment where change is the only constant. The third lesson addresses the value of leveraging this institutional capacity to tap into and establish an active presence of collaboration around innovation in post-secondary teaching and learning. In short, the following account of McMaster Continuing Education’s ongoing journey through the challenging terrain of online learning yields productive insights for committed educators across all branches of post-secondary teaching and learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".