The Year in e-Literacy

I’m generally conflicted about year-end lists of top blog posts because there is no single way to order the list that is truly reflective of the conversations that we’ve been having together on the blog. But after finding Audrey Watters’ list for Hack Education so interesting I thought, “Oh, what the heck.”

First, some general stats:

• We published 148 blog posts in 2013, bringing the total of posts on e-Literate to 1,116.
• We had about 310,000 visitors during the course of the year
• The most common search terms that led people to the blog (excluding variations on the blog name) were “moocs”, “lms market size”, and “mcgraw hill education”.
• We had visitors from 193 countries around the world.

Here are the top five posts as measured by the number of views:

1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield (with a whopping 87 comments on it, I might add)
2. “The Most Thorough Summary To Date of MOOC Completion Rates” in February 2013 by Phil Hill
3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
4. “State of the Higher Education LMS Market: A Graphical View” in September 2012 by Phil Hill
5. “Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A Graphical View” in March 2013 by Phil Hill

If we look at the number of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” ratings that readers gave to posts, the top five were as follows:

1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield
2. “A Taxonomy of Adaptive Analytics Strategies” in March 2013 by Michael Feldstein
3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
4. “Cengage MindTap and the Evolution of Courseware” in May 2013 by Michael Feldstein
5. “Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Improve Teaching” in January 2013 by Michael Feldstein

And if we look at the number of social media mentions in Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbedUpon, and Pinterest, then the top five are as follows:

1. “Why the Google Art Project is Important” in May 2013 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
2. “‘Can I Use This?’ How Museum Image Policies Undermine Education” in November 2012 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
3. “Google Apps for Education: When Will It Replace the LMS?” in April 2012 by Audrey Watters
4. “U.S. Claims Global Jurisdiction for .com and .net Web Sites: Is .edu Next?” in January 2012 by Jim Farmer
5. “Why Higher Education Is In Trouble, In One Graph” in March 2011 by Michael Feldstein

I would like to provide the top five most commented posts, but since we have integrated Google+ into our post pages a lot of our readers are commenting through that system rather than through WordPress, and I have no way of combining those numbers accurately.

At any rate, by any measure you choose, Phil and I are thrilled with the year we’ve had. We are humbled by the wonderful featured bloggers who have graced our pages—people like Elijah Mayfield, Mike Caulfield, Bill Jerome, Audrey Watters, Jim Farmer, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker—and deeply grateful for all of you who have taken the time to read, share, think about, and respond to what we have written.

We look forward to an even better year with you in 2014.