A Science "Reading List for Uncertain Times"
Selection "A must-read for anyone with even a passing
interest in the present and future of higher education." -Tressie
McMillan Cottom, author of Lower ...Ed "A must-read for the
education-invested as well as the education-interested."
- Forbes Proponents of massive online learning have
promised that technology will radically accelerate learning and
democratize education. Much-publicized experiments, often
underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at
elite universities and elementary schools in the poorest
neighborhoods. But a decade after the "year of the MOOC," the
promise of disruption seems premature. In Failure to
Disrupt , Justin Reich takes us on a tour of MOOCs,
autograders, "intelligent tutors," and other edtech platforms and
delivers a sobering report card. Institutions and investors favor
programs that scale up quickly at the expense of true innovation.
Learning technologies-even those that are free-do little to combat
the growing inequality in education. Technology is a phenomenal
tool in the right hands, but no killer app will shortcut the hard
road of institutional change. "I'm not sure if Reich is as famous
outside of learning science and online education circles as he is
inside. He should be…Reading and talking about Failure to
Disrupt should be a prerequisite for any big institutional
learning technology initiatives coming out of COVID-19."
- Inside Higher Ed "The desire to educate students well
using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as
Justin Reich illustrates…many recent technologies that were
expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in
ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant
inequalities." - Science
The MOOC pivot Reich, Justin; Ruipérez-Valiente, José A
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
2019-Jan-11, 2019-01-11, 20190111, Volume:
363, Issue:
6423
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
What happened to disruptive transformation of education?
When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in ...postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world's best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master's degrees for professionals (
1
). To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world's most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates (
2
)—has not improved over 6 years.
Rebooting MOOC Research Reich, Justin
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2015, Volume:
347, Issue:
6217
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Improve assessment, data sharing, and experimental design
The chief executive officer of edX, Anant Agarwal, declared that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should serve as “particle accelerator ...for learning” (
1
). MOOCs provide new sources of data and opportunities for large-scale experiments that can advance the science of learning. In the years since MOOCs first attracted widespread attention, new lines of research have begun, but findings from these efforts have had few implications for teaching and learning. Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions. For MOOC research to advance the science of learning, researchers, course developers, and other stakeholders must advance the field along three trajectories: from studies of engagement to research about learning, from investigations of individual courses to comparisons across contexts, and from a reliance on post hoc analyses to greater use of multidisciplinary, experimental design.
Preregistration and registered reports are two promising open science practices for increasing transparency in the scientific process. In particular, they create transparency around one of the most ...consequential distinctions in research design: the data analytics decisions made before data collection and post-hoc decisions made afterwards. Preregistration involves publishing a time-stamped record of a study design before data collection or analysis. Registered reports are a publishing approach that facilitates the evaluation of research without regard for the direction or magnitude of findings. In this article, I evaluate opportunities and challenges for these open science methods, offer initial guidelines for their use, explore relevant tensions around new practices, and illustrate examples from educational psychology and social science.
Open Education Science van der Zee, Tim; Reich, Justin
AERA open,
07/2018, Volume:
4, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Scientific progress is built on research that is reliable, accurate, and verifiable. The methods and evidentiary reasoning that underlie scientific claims must be available for scrutiny. Like other ...fields, the education sciences suffer from problems such as failure to replicate, validity and generalization issues, publication bias, and high costs of access to publications—all of which are symptoms of a nontransparent approach to research. Each aspect of the scientific cycle—research design, data collection, analysis, and publication—can and should be made more transparent and accessible. Open Education Science is a set of practices designed to increase the transparency of evidentiary reasoning and access to scientific research in a domain characterized by diverse disciplinary traditions and a commitment to impact in policy and practice. Transparency and accessibility are functional imperatives that come with many benefits for the individual researcher, scientific community, and society at large—Open Education Science is the way forward.
For decades, technology advocates have claimed that we are on the cusp of a complete transformation in education. But, as Justin Reich explains, such transformations have not yet come to pass. Even ...during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers did not use technology to significantly alter their teaching. Instead, technology enabled them to maintain many of their classroom routines (using learning management systems or video conferencing) or supplement their usual instruction (using gamified apps). Teachers did, however, tinker with their methods throughout the pandemic, gradually improving over time. Reich suggests that this tinkering framework is a more realistic way to think about ed tech’s potential to support teaching and learning.
As massive open online courses (MOOCs) shift toward professional degree and certificate programs, can they become a global on-ramp for increasing access to emerging fields for underrepresented ...groups? This mixed-methods study addresses this question by examining one of the first MOOC-based blended professional degree programs, which admitted students to an accelerated residential master's program on the basis of performance in MOOCs and a proctored exam. We found that male students and students with master's degrees were more likely to complete the online program and the blended program had more male students and more students with master's degrees than students in the existing residential program. Students who enrolled in the blended graduate program earned higher average grades than students in the residential program earned in their in-person courses (3.86 vs 3.75, p < .01). The findings of this study provide an example of how new online learning models can serve particular niches, but may not address broader equity challenges.
•Male students and students with master's degrees were more likely to successfully complete the online courses•Time and use of self-regulated learning strategies were key factors in being able to complete the online courses.•Male students and students with master's degrees were also more likely to use certain self-regulated learning strategies.•Blended participants performed better in their residential courses than those who were in the traditional residential program
Over two iterations of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for school leaders, Launching Innovation in Schools, we developed and tested design elements to support the transfer of online learning into ...offline action. Effective professional learning is job-embedded: learners should employ news skills and knowledge at work as part of their learning experience. This MOOC aimed to get participants to plan and actually launch new change efforts, and a subset of our most engaged participants were able and willing to do so during the course. Required assessments spurred student actions, along with instructor calls to action and modeling and exemplars provided by course elements. We found that participants led change initiatives, held stakeholder meetings, collected new data about their contexts, and shared and used course materials collaboratively. Collecting data about participant learning and behavior outside the MOOC environment is essential for researchers and designers looking to create effective online environments for professional learning.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education. We developed and evaluated a massive open online course (N = 963) with embedded equity simulations that attempted to equip ...educators with equity teaching practices. Applying a structural topic model (STM)—a type of natural language processing (NLP)—we examined how participants with different equity attitudes responded in simulations. Over a sequence of four simulations, the simulation behavior of participants with less equitable beliefs converged to be more similar with the simulated behavior of participants with more equitable beliefs (ES effect size = 1.08 SD). This finding was corroborated by overall changes in equity mindsets (ES = 0.88 SD) and changed in self-reported equity-promoting practices (ES = 0.32 SD). Digital simulations when combined with NLP offer a compelling approach to both teaching about DEI topics and formatively assessing learner behavior in large-scale learning environments.
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