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MOOCs are more than good university lectures available online

There is a danger that technology could undermine formal education…Arguments against formal education are now current again but, uninformed by any understanding of the theory of teaching and learning, they plunge us back into traditional approaches. Technology opportunists who challenge formal education argue that, with wide access to information and ideas on the web, the learner can pick and choose their education – thereby demonstrating their faith the transmission model of teaching. An academic education is not equivalent to a trip to the public library, digital or otherwise.

When none of the peers is an expert, there is too much risk of misconceptions and bad habits becoming established within the cohort.

The failure of MOOCs will concentrate minds on what are the prerequisites for success.

The reason why that learning analytics will not deliver on its promise is that analytics is predicated on “big data”. In education, big data does not yet exist and will not exist until we sort out the current failure of interoperability.

in nature, weak animals die but in a government-funded OER ecosystem, useless resources that nobody wants survive and multiply

The fact that interactivity (so essential to the process of learning) is claimed as a rare bonus reveals the dreary truth, that the vast majority of resources are expositive.

the job of educators is not to add yet more information but to manage the interactive process of learning how to use that information.

many people talk about “learner generated content” as a subset of OER, when what they are really referring to is student product: artifacts which are created by a student as an output of an instructional process but which are neither intended nor useful as an input for new processes.

OER cannot be isolated from a much wider and more troublesome “bubble”: the tendency of all public sector projects that are not subject to rigorous political control to grow, regardless of whether or not they are productive.

OER may be produced by commercial organisations in order to achieve publicity, by enthusiasts  for personal kudos; and by practitioners in order to save time through collaboration with peers.

The critical—and still largely missing—characteristic for effective learning content is interactivity

One particular type of educational software that needs to be developed will be high-level authoring tools that embed complex interactivity and good pedagogical design.

e-Portfolios will not work without: creative tools that can interoperate with learning management systems to automate the assignment of creative activities and the handling of creative product through a complex cycle of review, redrafting, assessment, reflection and sharing; competency definitions against which student-created artifacts can be assessed.

better interoperability is the next affirmative step that we need to take