Education Innovation – Tends to Crash and Burn or Can Thrive at Scale?

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Permalink Reply by Matt Bury on January 2, 2012 at 4:24pm

There's some very salient points made. A couple that I think they missed:

#1 Lack of valid, accurate data. We need good evidence that the pilot project wasn't an anomaly and that the learning outcomes are a direct result of the learning programme in question. This is notoriously difficult to do. The US department of Education did a meta-analysis of research comparing online vs. classroom learning programmes*. They had to discount 956 out of 1,132 of the research papers they found because they didn't meet even the loosest assessment criteria. None of the remaining 176 papers could establish cause-effect relationships and, at best, gave us promising avenues to pursue and do further research into.

#2 Technology or the medium used to "deliver" learning resources has less of an effect on learning outcomes than the learning and teaching approaches used. I suspect that investing more time and effort in cultivating effective communities of practice (http://www.ewenger.com/) and communities of inquiry would give better results per $,€,£ invested and lead to greater "scalability".

In short, I think we need to spend more time on helping and encouraging teachers to change how they think about learning and teaching, and how we approach testing and assessment, especially with what we now know about human cognitive development. It's a human issue rather than a technological one.

* Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/fina...

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