We have been critical here at e-Literate when we find ed tech vendors making spurious marketing claims, and Michael in particular has parlayed this into well-deserved NPR fame. But these answers from OSU go further and suggest that marketing claims are harming the vendors themselves. Our primary concern is whether faculty and staff have accurate information to support their own decision-making, and not the financial health of vendors, but this view of self-limitation is an interesting one to consider.
George Siemens
ED and CBE: Example of higher ed “structural barrier to change” that is out of institutions’ control
There has been a great conversation going on in the comments to my recent post “Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes” on too many relevant issues to summarize (really, go read the ongoing comment thread). They mostly center on the institution and faculty reward system, yet those are not the only sources of […]
Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes
George Siemens made an excellent point in his recent blog post after his White House meeting. I’m getting exceptionally irritated with the narrative of higher education is broken and universities haven’t changed. This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the “disrupt and transform” learning crowd. Universities are exceptional at innovating […]
Upcoming EDUCAUSE Webinars on Dec 4th and Dec 8th
Michael and I will be participating in two upcoming EDUCAUSE webinars. Massive and Open: A Flipped Webinar about What We Are Learning On Thursday, December 4th from 1:00–2:00 p.m. ET we will be joined by George Siemens for an EDUCAUSE Live! webinar: In 2012, MOOCs burst into public consciousness with course rosters large enough to fill a […]
e-Literate TV Interviews from MRI13 Now Available
In December 2013 Michael I attended the MOOC Research Initiative Conference (aka #MRI13 or “The greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs”). Thanks to a grant funded by the Gates Foundation through Athabasca University, we are creating three episodes of an upcoming e-Literate TV series based on the conference. We expect to release these episodes […]
MOOC history as presented at AACN13 conference
With all of the great discussions spawned by the “greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs” (MRI13), it seems a good time to share a segment of a keynote presentation I gave last year on MOOC history. This presentation was at the American Association of the Colleges of Nursing (AACN) conference in April 2013. For context, I […]
Changing the Narrative
As Phil mentioned, he and I were both lucky to attend the MOOC Research Initiative conference, which was a real tour de force. Jim Groom observed that even the famously curmudgeonly Stephen Downes appeared to be enjoying himself, and I would make a similar observation about the famously curmudgeonly Jonathan Rees. If both of those guys can […]