In the post by Jeff Haywood “No such thing as a free MOOC” on Edinburgh University and Coursera he states: “Currently we know little about MOOC learners, about how to design and deliver successfully in a range of subjects, and most importantly at a range of levels (eg final year undergrad). Is the experience helpful to learners, and do they get value from their certificates of completion? Much more research is needed, and perhaps JISC might find this a useful area in which to support the UK HE community”.
So why does this happen? Simple:
- The average time for publication in educational research journals is around 2-4 months
- There is too much biased editorial filtering
- Articles are dispersed into too many journals
- In this rapidly changing topic, much of what is published is already (nearly) obsolete when it appears.
The basic science research community was faced with exactly this same
problem some (many) years back.
From my perspective:
Perhaps as it happened in the world of physics and basic science, educational research should start implementing e-prints and an archiving system. See for example arXiv (an archiving system for electronic preprints) and inSPIRE (a retrieval system).
If you are interested in the answers to the following questions please see the added references:
- Is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form?
- Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals?
- Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?
[1] The division of MOOCs into c-MOOCs and x-MOOCs is similar in spirit to the expressions “connectivist MOOCs and the others” by (George Siemens, 2012) or “the real MOOCs, not the x-MOOCs” by (Stephen Downes 2012)
