Another free online book: the digitalization critics

When scrabbling around for ideas on a new blog post, I often check the latest offerings of those on my list of links to the right, and good old Terry Anderson has just come up with a cracker. It seems he’d recently spent an evening with the even older (mid-80s) father of distance education, Otto Peters (yes, he coined the term), who had presented Terry with a copy of his latest book: Against the Tide: Critics of Digitalisation. Continue reading

Sebastian Thrun has had a word with himself

Sixteen months ago I wrote an intemperate post about Sebastian Thrun (‘Someone please have a word with Sebastian Thrun!‘), galvanised by his seemingly breathtaking ignorance of the research literature concerning online learning. Had he acquainted himself with such literature, or had a word with someone familiar with ODL and online learning (e.g. any of the names on the links list at the right), he could have saved himself a couple of years in coming to the position he now apparently holds. This position is at serious odds with some of the outlandish claims he and others previously made concerning MOOCs. Continue reading

So you want to undertake research in ODL? Start with PREST!

Whenever I’m asked how to get started with research in open and distance learning, I have a one-word answer: PREST. Practitioner Research and Evaluation Skills Training (PREST) is a comprehensive set of resources produced by the Commonwealth of Learning and the International Research Foundation in Open Learning, and it is simply the best there is. Continue reading