TEL-lingit like IT is

In a logical turn of events, Udacity, the online educational service founded by artificial intelligence guru and ex-Googler Sebastian Thrun, is offering a new set of tech degrees that guarantee a job in six months or your money back. ( ElecCafe.com ,  Code School Udacity Promises Refunds if You Don’t Get a Job ).  Now this is very, very good news. It demonstrates how achieving career qualifications can finally overcome the unsustainable and, let's face it, unjustifiable debt that characterises higher education worldwide. Education is clearly in need of a "gale of creative destruction", to quote Schumpeter . There is much to applaud here. However, philosophically there is also much to be concerned about. The same article exposes the underlying assumptions around the approach taken by Udacity's Sebastian Thrum: “The ultimate objective of education is to find people a job” Hmmm. Finding a job is a great outcome, and in purely economic cost/benefit analysis it...

I recently finished reading Make it stick  by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roedigger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, published 2014 by Harvard University Press. The Kindle version is available here ; a summary version is also available on Kindle here . What I like about the book is summed up in this paragraph: Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on learning theories that have been handed down to us, and these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibility drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches, students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we teach is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what works and to discover the strategies that get results (p.7).  The difference is between common sense (likely a projection of our own preferences!) and evidence when it comes to promoting effective learning. Wi...

In 2001 I wrote Teaching for learning , a self-published eBook considering good practice in resource-based learning (RBL) design. I had just finished my Open University MAODE, and was inspired by the readings related to how the internet might reshape distance education. The book received good reviews [ one ], [ two ]... and, reflecting some 15 years later, its principles still seem contemporary (unlike my dress code at the time) and relevant to TEL. Some of the examples and suggestions are now passe, such as digitising and editing raw tape footage onto a CD-ROM(!) to accompany a printed workbook... but, hey, Moore's Law spread over a 15 year time-frame was bound to change the context! Here's a free link to the book, you're welcome to a copy: Teaching for learning PDF . I'm now a wee bit embarrassed by the 'best practice' stuff, so let's pretend the book was concerned with what was 'good', So, the elements of the good practice in RBL model from th...