Yesterday I received this very interesting Freakonomics podcast on the issue of the scalability of interventions. Often we see – also in education – that something works in an experiment or in a field trial, but when everybody starts adopting the new method or the new insight… it fails. There can be several reasons why,… Read More Again: silver bullets are seldom the case in education. E.g. no single solution helps all students complete MOOCs

There is a new study published in Science on the democratizing power of MOOC’s. In it they don’t look at the potential but rather examine who has participated so far, and while it maybe isn’t that surprising,  it’s not the group many people hoped for: Overall, individuals living in high-SES neighborhoods in the United States were… Read More New study on the democratizing power of MOOC’s: don’t get your hopes up too high

It’s not a fun week for technology and education. Yesterday there was the often mis-quoted OECD-report and than there is this headline: “Students learn 6 times more with CMU’s Simon Initiative approach than with MOOCs”. The study hasn’t been published in a journal, but in the Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @… Read More MOOC, the disaster movie?

Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn examined the instructional quality of 76 randomly selected Massive Open Online Courses (aka MOOCs), including 50 content-based xMOOCs and 26 connectivist cMOOCs. While the majority of MOOCs scored poorly on most instructional design principles, most MOOCs scored highly on organisation and presentation of course material. The quality was determined from first principles, using a Course… Read More Examining the instructional quality of MOOCs: Lots of window dressing, much less quality?