Justin Reich

Education researcher at MIT, and lead author of mooc-pivot (Science, 2019) with José A. Ruipérez-Valiente. He is the spoke's first author who measured an educational technology's outcomes rather than building or curating one.

That distinction is the reason for this node. Every other maker paged here — kamran-ahmed, nir-diamant, hao-hoang — ships a teaching artifact and reports its reach in stars. Reich reports what happened to 5.63 million learners afterwards, and the answer is a decline. The two genres do not just differ in tier; they answer different questions, and the spoke had only the first until now.

His closing argument in mooc-pivot generalizes past MOOCs: new education technologies are "rarely, perhaps never, disruptive; rather they are domesticated by existing cultures and systems," and expanding access to underserved populations "will not be achieved through new technologies alone." Filed here because the spoke keeps meeting the optimistic version of that claim in repository READMEs.

Related

mooc-pivot · meta-curriculum · self-directed-disposition-study · synthesis