17 June 2020

By Eileen Kennedy

Research on MOOCs can tell us what works for online learners.

Since we launched IOE’s first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) five years ago, we have been learning a lot about how to scale up online learning. I have been interviewing MOOC students and conducting Design Based Research into ways we can make online learning a social and collaborative experience for the thousands of participants who enrol on these courses.

Now that UCL and other universities are embarking on a mission to widen the reach of online teaching for students who would otherwise miss out because of COVID-19, what can research on MOOCs tell us about how to make it work for both teachers and students? Here are 5 easy tricks I have learnt to make it work for everyone: (more…)

10 June 2020

By Diana Laurillard

COVID-19 has radically changed the way we do higher education in the space of a few months. The pandemic should surely change the way we plan the future of HE across the world, in terms of both quality of provision and equality of access.

Education acts as a force for good when the decision-makers are committed to the values of a socially just and progressive future for all. A simple expression of this is to be ‘committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ – all 17 of them. They  are remarkably robust and appropriate for the world’s needs in the current crisis.

To name just three:

• SDG3 is to ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages’;
• SDG11 says ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’;
• SDG17 aims to ‘Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development’.

Had we carried these through more assiduously over the last five years HE in the UK would be better equipped (more…)

16 March 2020

By John Jerrim

The latest set of results from the TALIS 2018 study are about to come out. These will, among other things, present new evidence on how teachers’ mental health and stress levels compare across more than 40 countries. 

While England takes part in TALIS, the rest of the UK does not. This is unfortunate, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to compare education systems across different parts of the UK, despite these comparisons sometimes being the most interesting.

This prompts the question – how exactly does the wellbeing of teachers vary across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales?

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12 March 2020

By John Jerrim

We have written before about how teachers in England work longer hours, on average, than teachers in other countries. And this is an active area of government policy in England.

But the distribution of working hours of teachers also matters. Are some teachers not pulling their weight, while others are having to work excessive hours to cover for their workshy colleagues?

Although this is the case in some countries, England is not (more…)

18 February 2020

By Hafsa Garcia and Alex Standish

The outcry over Professor Danny Dorling’s suggestion that geography was for ‘posh’ but ‘dim’ students has furthered the discussion in the community about the lack of diversity within its student and teaching body. However, it is disingenuous to dismiss his claims as ‘entirely anecdotal and unsubstantiated’, as a group of colleagues has done in The THE.

The geography community has long been aware of its tendency to attract likeminded individuals from more wealthy families. Here, we share some research that looks at the reasons for this and how geography needs to change if it is going to become more inclusive.  

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5 February 2020

By Clare Brooks and Jo McIntyre

For a decade, national teacher education policy has focused on increasing the number of teacher training places in school-led programmes and diversifying the range of providers, and decreasing the involvement of universities.  The idea that universities have too much influence on new teachers and that courses are overly theoretical is not new. Ministers from across the political spectrum have been making these criticisms for generations.

We would like to challenge such dichotomous thinking, which is unique to the English context. It is self-evident that universities and schools work together in initial teacher education (ITE) partnerships and that each have a unique role within this. What has been silenced in the prioritisation of school-led provision in English teacher education policy has been the significant contributions that universities and academic research make as a result of their engagement with ITE. We highlight these below.

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24 September 2019

By John Jerrim

In education systems across the world, children are separated into different groups based upon their academic achievement. This is done in different ways.

Countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland ‘track’ pupils of high and low achievement into different schools (as do parts of England – Kent, for instance – that have retained grammar schools).

Others rely more heavily upon within-school ability grouping of pupils, whether this be setting/streaming, or sitting higher/lower achieving children together within the same class.

A whole host of research has compared countries in how much they segregate higher and lower achieving pupils into different schools. But there has been little work on the extent that different countries group high and low achievers together when they go to the same school.

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19 September 2019

By John Jerrim

Over the last five years, the Department for Education has taken steps to reduce teacher workload. This was spurred by results from the TALIS 2013 survey which illustrated how teachers in England work longer hours than teachers in most other countries. The government subsequently pledged to “[collect]robust evidence on teacher workload at least every two years”.

But what counts as “robust evidence”? And has the DFE kept this promise? Let’s take a look.

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18 September 2019

By John Jerrim

Today, I have released a new paper about teachers’ hours of work, co-authored with Sam Sims and Becky Allen. This is part of a project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, investigating the health and well-being of teachers in England.

This blogpost provides an overview of some of our key findings. A copy of the full paper is available here.

So, what have we learnt?

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24 June 2019

By Diana Laurillard and Eileen Kennedy, UCL Knowledge Lab

More than half the world’s refugees are children. Most of these children will spend their whole childhood away from home, with little access to education. In the context of the Syrian crisis alone, more than 2 million of that nation’s children have dropped out of school within Syria or in neighbouring host countries.

Our research aim is to test whether this kind of very large-scale educational challenge can be addressed by using the global platform of a MOOC as part of the solution.

Teachers can have an enormous impact on the lives of such children, providing continuity and support for physical, cognitive and social needs, in addition to education. In Lebanon, where a quarter of the population is made up of refugees from both Syria
and Palestine, teachers carry the responsibility for providing the basic schooling for (more…)