The year of no s**t Sherlock

With apologies for the potty mouth title. If you want a really good review of the year from an ed tech perspective then I suggest reading Audrey Watters' series of posts. One thing that I found myself doing repeatedly this year was staring open-mouthed at my screen as I read yet another 'discovery' or 'innovation' from US based silicon valley start-ups relating to education. It seems that if you want to be noticed then having no shame in pretending you have invented something is a real advantage. And journalists really do love a 'new and shiny' story. Here are some of my faves:

The SPOC - don't want your MOOC to be massive and open, then try a Small Private one. Or as we've called them for the past 15 years "an online course".

Hybrid Pedagogy - Clayton Christensen discovered “a fundamentally new concept [in] the world of disruptive innovation.” Or as we call it "blended learning"

MOOC based learning and innovation on campus - Coursera announced that it was working with universities to deliver MOOCs on campus. Or as we call it "elearning".

Micro-MOOCs - a micro-MOOC is either a platform to host video and content (or as we call it "the web") or "short e-courses" (or as we call them "OERs")

Creating quality courses is hard and expensive - who knew?

Retention with open access is difficult - again, why did no-one tell them this?

Massive open online content - again, as we call them "OERs"

I hope next year isn't as dumb.

Comments

[Clintlalonde]

One of my favorite "no shit" findings of 2013 came from some Coursera research which showed that "The more students interacted with others on the forum page, the better they learned" so course designers might want to build in interaction into their courses.

Imagine that. Students interacting with each other might actually improve learning.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/online-learning-analytics-041113.html

[mweller]

I hadn't seen that one Clint - pure gold. I'm so glad these hot-shots are there to tell us where we've been going wrong all these years.

[Markpower]

The Age of the Entrepreneur. And all the utter bollocks that comes with it. Sorry, I mean "b****cks". :)