George Veletsianos (an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC) and I have submitted an application for Iversity’s MOOC production fellowship program. If funded, we will co-teach a course titled “Foundations of Educational Technology.” (If not funded, we’ll figure something else out…)

The course will tackle something that I continue to write and rant about: a lack of understanding of the history, research, practices, and debates of education technology.

It isn’t simply that, as Santayana famously said, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — it’s also that folks might misdiagnose the present and as such misdirect us in the future.

In order to improve education and ed-tech, we think it’s important to know the answers to a number of questions including

• how do people learn? 
• how does technology/pedagogy impact learning? 
• why have educational technology efforts failed/succeeded in the past?

Our course will explore some of the answers to (in part by highlighting the debates surrounding) these questions. The class will draw on openly-available content and on the pedagogies and practices of cMOOCs.

The recipients of the Iversity MOOC fellowship will be chosen through a combination of peer review and public voting, and George and I would love your support for the latter. To vote for our proposal, you do have to register on the platform (ugh) first. You can also read more about the class there.

George has more details on his blog too, including an awesome list of other friends, colleagues, professors, and grad students who’ve volunteered to help.

Photo credits: Romana Klee, the Noun Project