Hapgood

Due to a moving-related injury I was sadly unable to attend ET4Online this year. Luckily my two co-presenters for the “Teaching the Distributed Flip” presentation carried the torch forward, showing what recent research and experiementation has found regarding how MOOCs are used in blended scenarios.

Here are the slides, which actually capture some interesting stuff (as opposed to my often abstract slides — Jim Groom can insert “Scottish Twee Diagram” joke here):

One of the things I was thinking as we put together these slides is how little true discussion there has been on this subject over the past year and a half. Amy and I came into contact with the University System of Maryland flip project via the MOOC Research Initiative conference last December, and we quickly found that we were finding the same unreported opportunities and barriers they were in their work. In our work, you could possibly say the lack of coverage was due to the scattered nature of the projects (it’d be a lousy argument, but you could say it). But the Maryland project is huge. It’s much larger and better focused than the Udacity/SJSU experiment. Yet, as far as I can tell, it’s crickets from the industry press, and disinterest from much of the research community.

So what the heck is going on here? Why aren’t we seeing more coverage of these experiments, more sharing of these results? The findings are fascinating to me. Again and again we find that the use of these resources energizes the faculty. Certainly, there’s a self-selection bias here. But given how crushing experimenting with a flipped model can be without adequate resources, the ability of such resources to spur innovation is nontrivial. Again and again we also find that local modification is *crucial* to the success of these efforts, and that lack of access to flip-focussed affordances works against potential impact and adoption.

Some folks in the industry get this — the fact the the MRI conference and the ET4Online conference invited presentations on this issue shows the commitment of certain folks to exploring this area. But the rest of the world seems to have lost interest when Thrun discovered you couldn’t teach students at a marginal cost of zero. And the remaining entities seem really reluctant to seriously engage with these known issues of local use amd modification. The idea that there is some tension between the local and the global is seen as a temporary issue rather than an ongoing design concern.

In any case, despite my absence I’m super happy to have brought two leaders in this area — Amy Collier at Stanford Online and MJ Bishop at USMD — together. And I’m not going to despair over missing this session too much, because if there is any sense in this industry at all this will soon be one of many such events. Thrun walked off with the available oxygen in the room quite some time ago. It’s time to re-engage with the people who were here before, are here after, and have been uncovering some really useful stuff. Could we do that? Could we do that soon? Or do we need to make absurd statements about a ten university world to get a bit of attention?