Just over the next hill ... is a new hill

 by lovingyourwork.com

We live in an age of reorganisation, makeovers, re-engineering and reinvention. Just over the next hill, after this reorganisation, when we've implemented the new quality assurance system ... we will find the promised land where everything works and everyone knows exactly their role. From a personal to a societal level we are constantly chasing our own tails in the hope that we can finally make it to Nirvana. There's a constant stream of books, courses, models and systems that can help us change and a thriving industry in inspirational lectures and conferences. We all naturally want to succeed but maybe we need to realise that we will never reach that ultimate perfection. Basically life is work in progress and we never really get beyond a beta version (though it may be an exceptionally good version), at least this time round.

This is nicely illustrated in a post by David Truss, Perpetual beta, on the subject of teaching where examples of best practice are held up as ideals. He finds this concept rather misleading because it suggests that there is an answer rather than best practice being the best available right now for a particular group in a particular situation. Your best practice may not work for me and vice versa. Again it's work in progress and practice is constantly being refined and tweaked. Truss sums this up as best practice is still just practice.

" ... we shouldn’t necessarily be talking about best practice. More practice can always help us improve on the best way(s) that we currently know of. So, in effect, the current ‘best’ usually isn’t the future best practice. This leads us to being in perpetual beta, experimenting and doing things differently."

Of course we learn from others and we can gain inspiration from good examples but maybe the adjective best is the illusion. Best can always be better.

You've seen the film, now do the MOOC!

CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by Sara Roegiers

Could MOOCs develop into an interesting media spin-off? Today it's not enough to write a book or make a film, you need to add the interactive game, the soundtrack album, tee-shirts, toys and all other merchandising. So why not add on a MOOC to the package allowing you to investigate the subject matter in more detail? The MOOC could offer a pathway for people to move from enjoying a good film/book to really investigating the issues behind it. Combine the game with the MOOC and a whole new educational genre awaits us.

This seems to be a bit of the thinking behind a new MOOC featured in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sabato’s Kennedy MOOC Has a Companion Book and a TV Special. A new Coursera course offered by the University of Virginia, The Kennedy half century, looks like attracting considerable global interest. Professor Larry J. Sabato who will teach the course about the political career of President John F Kennedy is tying the new MOOC to his recently published book on the subject, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy, as well as a new TV documentary. There is of course a hint of self promotion here but by tying the different media channels together you get a compelling package. Have a look at the course trailer film below.

However it isn't this particular example that interests me. The idea is that an open online course could become a common add-on to films and books allowing people whose interest has been aroused to gain a deeper insight into the issues raised. Historical films, biographies, films from literature and so on could come with a follow-up MOOC to study what really happened, read more of the author's works, investigate a political career etc. The courses could range from academic studies to pure general interest. Why not MOOCs for kids linked up with popular films? It's a long way from Harvard but if it encourages more people to be curious and study more then I'm in favour.

Fly-on-the-wall lecture capture doesn't work

 by evesdropping

A lot has been written about the power of MOOCs to democratize education, making courses from the world's elite universities available to all at the click of a mouse. This is true to a certain extent since the key players in the mass-MOOC market are the likes of Harvard, MIT and Stanford but the problem is that the rest of the world is still on the outside looking in. True we can now gain an insight into how courses are taught at the top universities but only by pressing our faces against the shop window. The real courses are still elite and exclusive and we certainly don't get any credentials from these institutions for completing their online courses.

An article in Mindshift, Is Online Education Widening the Digital Divide? sees these MOOCs as leading to a wider division between the elite and the rest rather than the reverse. The article takes the case of teachers at San Jose State University who were asked to use material from a Harvard MOOC with their students and refused. The problem was that the course material consisted of recorded lectures and interaction between the teacher and the Harvard class. This type of fly-on-the-wall lecture filming is of course simple and cheap to produce but it reinforces the feeling of exclusion for the online student. The teacher addresses a visible audience of elite students and not the wider online audience. The online students are looking through a window at the elite students and their teacher rather than directly being involved.

According to Peter Hadreas, professor and Philosophy Department Chair at San Jose State University:

“We have a very diverse student body and we’re very proud of that,” Hadreas said. “But they would watch Michael Sandel teach Harvard students and he would interpolate into his talks and dialogues how privileged they were. And they were for the most part, certainly to a greater extent, white than our student body. So we’ve got, on the one hand, this strange sort of upstairs/downstairs situation where the lower-class people could look at how the upper-class people were being educated. We thought that was just flat out insulting, in a way, to the students and certainly not pedagogically reinforcing.”

The classroom session works well just there in the room but loses all its impact when filmed because the classroom interaction is missing for the online audience. Many universities are moving away from classroom lecture capture, replacing one hour lectures with a series of short lecture segments recorded direct in front of the camera so that the teacher is speaking to the online learner without classroom students in front of them. That eye contact can make a lot of difference and create the feeling that the teacher is addressing me.

What works in the classroom does not usually work online. Filming a classroom session is only useful to that class as a record of their work and as revision material. Don't show it to online students.

Too much cake

  by Omar Chatriwala

I wrote recently about self-service learning and how MOOCs offer a convenient complement to formal education. The analogy of the self-service cafeteria where learners can compose their own blend of short courses is very attractive and I believe that we are seeing the emergence of a much more varied and flexible ecosystem for learning combining the benefits of short, just-in-time online courses with longer formal courses and programmes. You choose the option that best fits your current lifestyle and needs.

However there is a danger of letting everyone compose their own education by piecing together dishes from a gigantic buffet. What happens if you only choose the cakes and miss out the vegetables? This is the theme of an article in the Washington Post by Robert F Bruner: Commentary: Without structure, learning crumbles. He's worried that the new educational buffet will mean that people will only learn what they want to learn and thus will miss the less attractive but essential details that put everything into context. It's a bit like the problem of personalization on the web. If we can tweak our preferences so that we are only exposed to news and information that we agree with we will simply live in a bubble, unaware of other points of view or sheltered from unpleasant information. Our own preferences are not enough. Someone has to ensure that we have a balanced diet.

"Too much dessert and not enough broccoli. Students who simply follow their appetites will eventually find some educational candy: courses that may gratify an immediate interest, but don’t really build one’s capabilities. Like a healthy diet, a great education consists of a balance of intellectual nutrition. Eat your vegetables. They are good for you."

How do we make sure students "eat their greens" as well as benefitting from the flexibility and diversity of today's learning environment?

Copyright Bermuda Triangle

 by Dave Stokes

The book shops of the world are crammed with titles and more books are published today than ever before. However once a book has been available for a few years it disappears from the shelves and unless the publishers think it worth a new edition it will become extremely difficult to read the book unless your local library happens to have a copy. This is one major problem with current copyright law. Popular titles will of course be republished regularly but the vast majority will not be worth a publisher producing a new edition and as a result they will become unavailable outside a few libraries or second-hand bookstores. Millions of books are lost until the copyright period expires.

This problem is well illustrated by recent research summed up in an article by Rebecca J Rosen in The Atlantic, The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish.

"A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan."

The article examines research by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois who has analysed all books available on Amazon to see how different decades in the last 150 years are represented. The copyright Bermuda Triangle is clear in the statistics presented. Books available from the 1850's are double the number of titles from the 1950's. Basically you can buy and access millions of currently published titles plus just about everything pre-1923 but very little in between. So millions of books are hidden away because they're not worth republishing and copyright prevents them from being published digitally. Heald sums up the situation:

"Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability ... Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."

Since no-one is going to make any money from selling this vast resource why not let them be available as simple e-books for free? At least they will be available and read by some. Maybe they could be sold for micro-payments, a bit like the music service Spotify, where subscribers pay a low monthly fee and can read whatever they want. That way the authors could at least earn a little from their title instead of zero if it is out of publication as at present. I'm not suggesting that we do this for best-sellers but for the millions of forgotten books that are now languishing in the Bermuda Triangle of copyright.

Drowning in freedom

 by Intersection Consulting

Today there is a vast range of free open courses and communities where you can learn just about anything; if you know how to take advantage of them. Although MOOCs and open learning offer new paths to learning for people who otherwise have no access to higher education there is still a high threshold for participation. You need a high level of digital literacy to find the courses, sign up and especially to participate. You need to be a proficient self-learner with high motivation and confidence in your ability to succeed. You need to be open to new methods and have a wide range of learning strategies. It's not surprising then that most MOOC participants already have a degree and are at home on the net. Even if we feel overwhelmed by the MOOC hype, out there in the "real" world few people have ever heard the term.

An excellent article by Keith Brennan in Hybrid Pedagogy examines how connectivism and MOOCs fail to support inexperienced learners and those with low self-esteem in education: In Connectivism, No One Can Hear You Scream: a Guide to Understanding the MOOC Novice. He identifies key factors for student success: self efficacy, cognitive load and prior knowledge. Self efficacy is the belief that you will succeed and this is essential in courses like MOOCs which lack the scaffolding and encouragement of more traditional courses. This belief is also essential for dealing successfully with the cognitive load, the volume of new information and assumed skills, the you are faced with in many online courses. Many MOOCs and connectivist courses assume a high level of prior knowledge, in particular when it comes to using social media and digital tools. If you lack these skills you will find such courses bewildering and there is a high probability that you will give up.

Inexperienced learners need lots of encouragement, feedback, guidance and quick support responses and these are generally missing in MOOCs (both c and x varieties). Of course there is plenty of peer support but I can imagine that even contributing to discussion forums  can be daunting for inexperienced learners. Seeing peers succeed can be a motivating factor if you already have a positive attitude to your own ability but if not the sight of others succeeding where you feel confused can have a demotivating effect. Brennan gives a list of demotivating factors:

• Watching others succeed while you don't
• Too much information delivered in a chaotic environment (Twitter hashtags, blog feeds, RSS, discussion forums etc)
• Decentralisation of the learning process (too much choice, "drowning in freedom")
• Complex tasks with little or no guidance

All this can be stimulating for some but not everyone is comfortable with this level of freedom.

"Not everyone knows how to be a node. Not everyone is comfortable with the type of chaos Connectivism asserts. Not everyone is a part of the network. Not everyone is a self-directed learner with advanced metacognition. Not everyone is already sufficiently an expert to thrive in a free-form environment. Not everyone thinks well enough of their ability to thrive in an environment where you need to think well of your ability to thrive."

Courses need to have clear pre-course information of what skills you need to participate fully (maybe linking to pre-course training or courses that will teach you these skills) and a clear description of the kind of teaching and learning that the course will employ. The new learners that so many MOOCs claim to be aiming at need help to get on board and more help to keep them there. Self-service is great if you know what you want but confusing if you're used to being served.

"MOOCs are littered with the drowned, who want to participate, but see their sense of possibility get sucked under by an experience designed to, in part, ensure they sink."

The MOOC debate reaches calmer waters

 by lanier67

“I don’t see the MOOC that I teach as a threat to traditional universities or to the discipline, rather just the opposite. It’s the sort of thing a public university should be doing: broadcasting its knowledge.”

This quote from Dr. Matt McGarrity of the University of Washington in an article on e-Learning Industry, University of Washington instructor dives into MOOC spotlight, sums up what I believe is the essence of the MOOC movement. Most universities are funded by public money, at least to some extent, and all have policies for outreach activities and involvement with the society they serve. Allowing the world access to the course material they use is part of this outreach and a way of showing the taxpayers what they're paying for. As I've written many times I don't think that MOOCs are so much a threat to education as an extremely welcome complement, offering new groups of students access to new paths for learning. These courses can have varying degrees of pedagogical innovation, some will work and others will flop, but they will make higher education more accessible than ever before, whether or not any credits are available from them.

Another quote in this interview with McGarrity that I liked was this one about the MOOC dropout rate:

"To some degree, so much of the talk about dropout rate misinterprets the initial enrollment figure, right? The threshold one must cross to sign up for the course is a button click. So they’re talking about the button click, which may not be a genuine enrollment. It’s like Facebook accounts—maybe there are so many million, but a lot of them are empty. So, the question is of those enrollments, is active students from Week 1 to Week 10. That’s probably a better way to look at it."

We should be looking at how many students completed the course and focus on that rather than those who "dropped out". Many of the dropouts probably never even dropped in: they simple clicked on the enroll button and forgot about it. If 1,000 people complete the course that's pretty impressive and what happened to the other 4,000 is probably not so relevant. It certainly can't be compared with dropping out of a campus course that has cost you a lot of money and is a major life commitment - something has to be seriously wrong to drop out of a 4-year degree program.

It's good to read more and more realistic and thoughtful views on the whole MOOC movement. Maybe we're moving out of the initial hype phase.

MOOCs for credit - few takers so far

 by Ian Wilson

When MOOCs first appeared there were many who criticized them for not offering university credits to successful students. The main providers like Coursera, Udacity, EdX etc only provided certificates of completion that were not educational hard currency and so the search began to find ways of offering MOOCs for credits. One of the earliest initiatives on this front was Colorado State University who offered successful MOOC students from Udacity the opportunity to complement their studies by paying to sit a supervised examination with the reward of university credits. The fees for this were a fraction of the price of taking the equivalent cost on campus and many thought that this would open up a new business model for higher education with major universities producing course content and structure and other universities offering validation and examination opportunities.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes this week that the scheme at Colorado State has been a total flop so far with no students applying for MOOC validation in the past year: see article A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers. Although this sounds like a serious failure I think we should reserve judgement until we get statistics from other similar schemes and when the MOOCs for credit model is more mature. The question at the moment is whether current MOOC participants are even interested in credits; the Udacity students who had the option of going to Colorado State for examination were clearly not interested. A lot of stats I've seen indicate that most are already graduates and are studying out of interest and that MOOCs are mostly a part of lifeline learning rather than seriously competing against traditional higher education. Those of us involved in e-learning and education in general may feel that MOOCs have been hyped to death but out in "the real world" I'm not sure that so many people even know that MOOCs exist. The concept has not reached the people MOOCs are attempting to reach; namely those who have no access to higher education.

So what about MOOCs for credit? If we award credits we need learning outcomes, curriculum, assessment, examination, identity control, administrative requirements etc and once all that's in place isn't this really a regular online university course? I believe that there will be a massive growth in informal learning, encompassing MOOCs and many other forms, and that the demand for validation will increase accordingly but at the moment the demand for crossover (from MOOCs to formal credentials) is simply not there. Evolution takes time and the MOOC wave will develop into new structures and new opportunities but right now we need patience to let organisations try out different solutions.

This is a sentiment that is developed in an article from Inside Higher Ed, Beyond MOOC Hype, where leaders in higher education call on everyone to take a step back from the hype and examine the MOOC phenomenon more critically. It's too soon to make categorical judgements one way or the other but it is time for all parties to seriously examine the opportunities available.

Self-service learning

CC BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by Kwong Yee Cheng

Take courses from the world's best universities featuring their top professors completely free! That's what we've been hearing about MOOCs for the past two years or so and many articles I've read have swallowed this message almost without question, making claims that MOOCs will sweep away expensive higher education and revolutionize universities. Let's calm down a little now and ask why they are free and what the differences are between MOOCs and the regular university courses (campus or online) that cost money and are based on students meeting entry requirements.

Comparing MOOCs to regular courses is a bit like self-service compared to table service. All the ingredients are in there and you make your own way through the material on your own or in the company of friends. If you have questions there's generally no responsible member of staff available to answer but often someone else in the queue can help since they've eaten here before. The food is generally good but it's up to you how you compose your meal and there's not much guidance available. Some people don't take a full 3-course meal and some only drop in for a coffee but everyone is welcome to drop in when they can. It's much cheaper than a restaurant with table service and highly trained staff and is perfectly adequate in many circumstances. But sometimes we want that special treatment, advice, quality, atmosphere, comfort and exclusivity and we're willing to pay for it. It's not a question of one or the other but they both fill important roles.

There's an excellent article on this theme by Jason Boyers in the Huffington Post, Why MOOCs Miss the Point With Online Learning. He describes how regular online university courses differ from  MOOCs by offering qualified support, clear learning objectives, interaction, engagement and of course examination. It's wrong to say that MOOCs are offering top university education for free - you get some good content and a structure but without the elements that add valuable quality.

"The premise is that you are paying for the same thing you might otherwise get for free, but you are not. There are few things that are equal between a MOOC and high quality online education. You are paying for an engaged faculty member, who is working with you toward course completion. You are paying for meaningful feedback on assessments and documented growth in a higher level of understanding about a topic. You are paying to learn alongside students who all exhibit relatively the same investment in the learning experience as you, and who will likely be there tomorrow to respond to your discussion post. You are paying for an administration that is committed to your course completion because they are accountable for your success. You are paying for content that is part of a larger whole; this course is but one along a journey toward a degree or certificate."

The main point here is that it has taken 10-15 years to develop quality online learning. MOOCs, at least in their high profile form, offer exciting opportunities to make elements of higher education accessible to all but they are not replacing quality online learning any time soon.

Open or closed?

 by Traveller_40

There's a fascinating interview with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in the Economist that I would like to quote as food for thought, Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive. Christensen is the man behind the concept of disruptive innovation from his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma and has some radical views about the role of universities in the post-MOOC world. It is not the technology that is disruptive it's what they enable people to do with it. MOOCs are opening up educational opportunities for millions of people who would otherwise be excluded from higher education. Technology is making mass education possible and affordable and will inevitably affect enrollments at traditional universities. Christensen claims that we are likely to see universities going bankrupt in the near future as competition increases.

However the part of the interview that interests me most concerns research, the main focus of the academic world. In a world already drowning in content we keep producing more and for increasingly small audiences. Christensen questions universities' investment in research which seldom has much impact outside the confines of a narrow research community.

"We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties’ salaries to fund research.
The problem is the research that most of them generate isn't useful to anyone except other academics. In business there are five ‘A’ journals in which you have to publish to get promoted to tenure. In one of those five the average article is read by 12 people. If only one in every five research universities stopped doing research, society wouldn't be impaired in the least."

Harsh words there and many will object. But for me the main point here is the dangers of the closed academic system producing ideas and results that remain behind the walls of copyrighted academic journals. In such silos research becomes an exclusive commodity for a restricted audience. However he also offers the promise of increasing openness in education, enabling wider participation and stimulating more meaningful research.

"Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before. And most universities are organised so you don't have those intersections. They are siloed. Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research."

Read the article: Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive.

Reclaim open learning

 by -pdp-

I've previously written about the need to refocus on real open learning again after being blinded by the glitter of the high profile xMOOCs for the past year or so. I don't mean we should dismiss them but instead see them as a development of the traditional educational model rather than something truly innovative and certainly not particularly open. Those of us who are interested in the development of open educational resources that are free to reuse and adapt and education that is truly open need to look beyond the mainstream MOOCs and find inspiration elsewhere.

Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U and other works on open learning, wrote a good post in the Huffington post, Can We Move Beyond the MOOC to Reclaim Open Learning? about the need to let the MOOCs go their way and raise the profile of truly open and innovative learning. This learning is happening everywhere but receives little media coverage: in communities of practice, virtual worlds, forums, Twitter, social networks, wikis and so on. They also take place face-to-face wherever people can meet to discuss common interests. They are learner-initiated and create their own learning resources or make use of existing open educational resources and there are no formal credentials available.

Anya belongs to a group known as Reclaim open learning (#ReclaimOpen) which is a network of open learning supporters who wish to encourage more development and innovation in the field. Right now they're running an innovation contest to showcase best practice in open learning that has so far escaped the media spotlight but deserves support. The contest raises the following questions:

• What are independent learners and innovative teachers doing now that deserves support, recognition, and scaling up?
• How can colleges and universities engage with the social, participatory, and open learning ecology of the Internet in ways that go beyond making, using, or resisting xMOOCs?
• What kinds of infrastructures, policies, and business models can support more participatory and peer-based forms of post-secondary learning?
• What kind of programs and platforms could meld the grassroots capacity and peer-based learning of the net with the knowledge, expertise, and credibility of institutionalized research and education?

If you have the answers to these questions and know of innovative learning that deserves support just send in the details.

Learner-initiated learning

 by *Psycho Delia*

An article by Trent Batson on Campus Technology, The Essence of MOOCs: Multi-Venue, Non-Linear, Learner-Initiated Learning, sees the present MOOC movement as only one element of a more wider and fundamental change in education. Instead of solely relying on institutions to offer ready-made courses the modern learner has many other options available. The move towards learner-initiated learning is about learners taking charge of their own development and actively looking for the right courses, communities or networks that will help you learn the skills you need. In this arena MOOCs are simply one of many potential arenas for learning.

"The upswing of interest in MOOCs is perhaps a harbinger of the speeding up of a historic move to learner-initiated learning (LIL). Learner-initiated learning is a term that may best describe the new forms of learning that have emerged to combine learning experiences from multiple venues. An internship here, a course there, job-related learning here, self study there and so on (often called DIY learning). Even students enrolled in degree programs do "swirling," taking courses from colleges or universities away from their home institution. Or, as an added option now, learners may take a MOOC, or use open education resources as part of or in addition to assigned materials. LIL is also related to "self-directed learning" or "self-initiated learning," two research threads that began in the last century."

Those who succeed in this new educational ecosystem will be those who have learned how to learn, are digitally literate and are able to develop their own learning portfolio. This portfolio on the net will contain all your significant work from courses, projects, publications and other activities such as blogs or wikis. Keeping this updated and in an accessible and coherent structure will be essential so that particular units or sequences of work can be validated and assessed by independent reviewers when necessary.

The challenge for today's educators is helping as many as possible to be part of this development - learning to learn.

Massive Open Online Whatever

 by revbean

There's a thickening alphabet soup brewing with variations on the three letters MOO. What we're seeing is the potential of massive communities or networks to solve certain problems or offer new opportunities. Exactly how open and massive they are varies considerably and we shouldn't focus on all these often misleading acronyms. Look instead at each concept on its own merits and see what it offers.

The idea presented a couple of weeks ago of using the MOOC concept to offer greater support to doctoral students and provide them with a greater sense of community and access to wider peer review makes a lot of sense, though the details are still to be fully worked out. Now comes an article by Benjamin Ginsberg, Forget MOOCs - Let's use MOOA, where he suggests massive open online administration to share the administrative load on universities. It's really a case of building a community around university administration and pooling resources rather than each institution reinventing the wheel every week, at an enormous cost. By working as a community and sharing smart ideas and best practices can spread more quickly and expensive mistakes could be avoided.

"Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars."

Ginsberg plans to launch an administrative community Administeria next year and it'll be interesting to see how it is received. There is nothing terribly new about this idea since large communities have been collaborating on the net for many years but the MOOC-hype has brought the power of massive communities to the forefront. 

On a related theme a meeting of global virtual universities has discussed the mainstream MOOC phenomenon: see article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virtual Universities Abroad Say They Already Deliver ‘Massive’ Courses. There are many online universities in the world who have been running massive and relatively open online courses for years, such as the Virtual University of Pakistan (see their massive YouTube channel) or the African Virtual University, and providing education more suited to their target students than those of the mainstream MOOCs. MOOCs offer new opportunities for learning but it's worth remembering that they are variations on themes that have been present for some time now. Online education is so much more than MOO ....

In defence of the lecture

  by TED Conference

It's very fashionable to claim that the lecture is dead (I've done it myself) and that there is no need for the form in modern education. While I firmly believe that lecturing as the default form of university teaching is on the way out we need to consider when the lecture can be of positive value. In our enthusiasm to embrace the potential of technology in education it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The simple fact is that despite all the criticism lectures are more popular than ever. The iTunes U platform features almost half a million of them and they are downloaded and viewed by millions every week and if you throw in the lectures featured in all the MOOCs the sheer volume is astounding. Sure many of them are very traditional and not particularly inspiring but there is no disputing their popularity whatever we may think of the pedagogy.

However many MOOC providers have realised that online audiences learn more from more a series of concise lectures of 5-10 minutes rather than one hour marathon sessions. The staggering success of TED talks is a clear indication that we enjoy lectures if they're short and sweet. Maybe the appeal is linked to the massive appeal of stand-up comedy; one comedian on stage with no props or extras. TED talks feature the masters of stand-up teaching and they consistently succeed in inspiring and providing food for thought. Isn't that effective teaching? From sage on the stage to dean on the screen.

Tony Bates comes to the defence of the lecture in an article The beginning of the end of the lecture hall?. He makes the following list of occasions when a lecture would be a valuable feature of a course and asks if readers can add to it:

• a lecture at the beginning of a course to set the tone and build a sense of community
• a lecture at the end of a course to pull things together, to provide a synthesis, or a sense of completion or to ask: where now? 
• a lecture in the middle as a check on where students are, what are the ‘sticking points’, and a realignment of expectations or resetting of students’ focus 
• a lecture for a research professor to synthesize/summarize his/her findings or the field in which they are researching 
• special occasions, such as analyzing a dramatic current event in terms of theories or principles studied in a course: why, how, what next, etc. 
• distinguished visitors who have something extra to add to a course or program.

The conclusion here is that we should be careful not to simply dismiss traditional methods and rush to the shiny new ones. Many people learn a lot from lectures, some learn very little, some thrive in a traditional classroom, others do not. Let's integrate the old with the new to offer a wide range of learning paths to suit all tastes. 

Fast forward

  by DaGoaty

How often do you read an article on a web site to the end? Not often I suspect and my fears are confirmed in a fascinating article by Farhad Manjoo, You Won’t Finish This Article. He cites traffic statistics from the web site Slate showing readers' habits and how long they spend on articles. According to the stats we very seldom read whole articles any more and many people seldom get past the first two paragraphs. A staggering 38% hardly read more than the first sentence. Many more show a great reluctance to scroll so anything you write below the horizon of the browser window may only be read by less than half of your "readers".

"Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing."

So even if lots of people seem to have landed on this blog there's no guarantee that any of them have actually read my posts. Getting loads of retweets doesn't mean that any of them have read anything either, they're just sharing. So technically a blog post could get enormous coverage in social media without anyone actually reading it to the end. If you write something outrageous in the last paragraph the chances are you'll get away with it. It's the literary equivalent of TV zapping where we give a programme about 10 seconds to grab our attention before zapping onward.

It's easy for stats like this to prompt outraged end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it responses. But the sheer volume of information we are subjected to every day makes it hard to focus on anything for long in case we miss the next big story. We've never been better at skim reading but at the cost of forgetting the art of deep reading, following an in-depth discussion, listening to a long piece of music etc. I'm as guilty as anyone and confess to often reading half an article or less and have indeed tweeted about them. I save them however and try to read them later when I have more time. Sometimes I succeed.

I'll end this by quoting Manjoo's closing remarks:

"Maybe this is just our cultural lot: We live in the age of skimming. I want to finish the whole thing, I really do. I wish you would, too. Really—stop quitting! But who am I kidding. I’m busy. You’re busy. There’s always something else to read, watch, play, or eat."