Donald Clark has been reading and summarising - to good effect - Carol Twigg's work for the National Centre for Academic Transformation. (See Favourite e-learning research; Carol Twigg's research on cost-effectiveness; Effective learning through e-learning; reducing drop-out rates.)
On 7/9/2005 Carol did a keynote at the 2005 ALT Conference in Manchester. At the last minute, Carol was unable to attend the conference in person, so she delivered the speech remotely. A technical issue between the US and the UK prevented her from using the microphone in the studio she was in, so she did the whole keynote with a mobile phone. Despite this she held the attention of 500 people for an hour. Stunning. Carol's slides from her presentation, and my summary of Carol's answers to questions after her keynote are here on the ALT web site.
As an aside, I think that there is more than a streak of "not invented here" in relation to UK attitudes to Carol's work; ALT* and others have been regularly referencing the work in responses to policy consultations; but the underlying "points of fact" that the National Centre for Academic Transformation has established have tended either to be ignored, or marginalised with explanations as to why "it ain't like that in the UK".
*Disclosure. I work part time for ALT.
On 7/9/2005 Carol did a keynote at the 2005 ALT Conference in Manchester. At the last minute, Carol was unable to attend the conference in person, so she delivered the speech remotely. A technical issue between the US and the UK prevented her from using the microphone in the studio she was in, so she did the whole keynote with a mobile phone. Despite this she held the attention of 500 people for an hour. Stunning. Carol's slides from her presentation, and my summary of Carol's answers to questions after her keynote are here on the ALT web site.
As an aside, I think that there is more than a streak of "not invented here" in relation to UK attitudes to Carol's work; ALT* and others have been regularly referencing the work in responses to policy consultations; but the underlying "points of fact" that the National Centre for Academic Transformation has established have tended either to be ignored, or marginalised with explanations as to why "it ain't like that in the UK".
*Disclosure. I work part time for ALT.
Not Invented Here - a very acute comment. Year after year we hear for the need to convince people through research on the need to transform education and training through technology. Yet, when good research comes along there's always some reason to shelve it. Having attended universities on both sides of the Atlantic, I personally think that UK educational institutions have more to learn from Twigg's research than those in the US, as we have poorer practice in teaching (not research).
The bottom line is that few Vice Chancellors would have heard of the research and many want to quietly ignore its findings because it means change.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 15/03/2009 at 18:49