In the last two hundred years, we have gratly transformed the spaces in which we live.

Think about your home. Not a single appliance was there 200 years ago

Think about the workplace 200 years ago? It probably looked a lot like the view you get from the train when you are going to the countryside

Think about your car. Emmm. Indeed, there were no cars 200 years ago

There is one space that has barely changed, since 200 years ago

 

The science of instructional design has not advanced much indeed. Even the question ” What is learning” falls right into the realm of the esotheric. The training industry highjacking the government in order to protect professional trades has certainly not helped…

In this page you will find books that push forward the theory of learning and instructional design.

BOOKS

Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools 

by Michael Horn

Clayton Christensen’s super insightful protégé Michael Horn produced a book with case studies and guidelines for implementing blended learning environments

Orchestration Graphs-Modeling Scalable Education

by Pierre Dillenbourg

This book “describes how rich learning activities”, often designed for small classrooms, can be scaled up for thousand of participants.

Personally, I want to learn everything in this book because the modelling of rich learning activities, even in the small classroom, is a heavily underresearched topic. If we could reproduce the  classroom management techniques of a world-class teacher and, say, bake them in an app, wouldn’t the world be a much better place?

 

Notes on Research Papers

Coming Soon: The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring

Benjamin Bloom

“average students, tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed better than 98% of the students in the control class who learn via conventional instructional methods”

Coming Soon:Will video kill the classroom star? the threat and opportunity of massively open online courses for full-time mba programs

Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich-University of Pennsylvania

Coming Soon: Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera, Louis Soares February 2011

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Coming Soon: The case against education.

Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan is a downright super-star economist. He is a very very intense libertarian. In this talk he will try to convince us that a lot of what we call educationn, edpecially higher education, is just a tool, and so are we.