Meta this, meta that...

Studies related to technology are somewhat frozen in time.  By the time that they are produced, they are already dated.

Metaanalysis is a wonderful stop gap technique, but should not take the place of actual first-hand studies.  I hadn't read papers using effect sizes in forever, so I had to review my stats to make sure that the methods that I was familiar with were the ones that they were using in the studies.

I still find it interesting that there aren't baseline academic metrics yet.... like they would emerge in the weeks since I last noted this.  It seems like someone should market an "online education rating" service to do this.  Anyone want in?  The more schools that get involved, the more necessary it becomes for others to publish specific and timely academic metrics.  Kind of like a Moody's rating service, but for schools... and without the conflict of interest that throws the world into financial peril.  Paying a profit making establishment to rate you provides too many incentives that can lead to doom.  We don't need an educational crisis of financial proportions.  Can this be done efficiently by a third-party?  I would think so.

There was a lot of talk of meta this week, but I would like to see a meta-recommation that creates a consolidated data and practice recommendation based on the recommendations from all of these studies.  I am sure that I'm losing some great ones from week to week.

The reports this week were interesting, but I felt like I was reading, and reading, and reading, etc...  I still want to know who gets their hands on them?  Who reads the THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION?  Can parents find these reports?  Can teachers?  Can students?  We know it is out there, but who else is reading?

The Hughes paper touched on the subject of cheating... "support" as she called it...  I have been ignoring this aspect of online learning entirely, making the assumption that people are learning for the sake of learning, but this is naive.  Maybe for a college student.... Just maybe, but for K-12?  I think I need to think about this some more.  We discussed this for a second in our group, but thought that it was outside the scope our our project.  Should curriculum designers overly concern themselves with this?  Should an online teacher?

From an assessment standpoint, it should be a hassle to cheat for the majority of students. With digital rights management for example, a level of protection that thwarts the majority of "casual" pirates is good enough because they know they can't do anything about "motivated" pirates.

To what lengths must teachers and writers ultimately go in light of the fact that we are moving into technologies that are abstracted and obscured from all but techies?  This is like the analogy that I made previously about people no longer being able to DYI tinker on their cars anymore because of all of the computer assistance.

... but they didn't.

There was no chem regents that year because of "motivated" pirates.

My final grade was my regents grade and that was fine with me.

Should teachers and unit designers plan for this case?