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Category: Design Based Research

Research–Practice Partnerships in Education

May 19, 2016Written by terrya

My Google Scholar alert notified me that one of my articles was cited in an as yet not publisher preprint in Educational Researcher. I don’t usually bother with articles hidden behind paywalls, but I was intrigued by the title:

Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research–Practice Partnerships in Education: Outcomes, Dynamics, and Open Questions. Educational Researcher. http://edr.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/28/0013189X16631750.abstract.

However, I was NOT prepared to pay SAGE to rent the article for 24 hours for $36 US and I didn’t really want to wait until I could access it through my University library. Luckily Mr Google found an excellent white-paper article by the same authors that was sponsored by a Foundation and so available for free download :

Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., & Geil, K. E. (2013). Research-Practice Partnerships. A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts. William T. Grant Foundation, New York, NY. http://rpp.wtgrantfoundation.org/library/uploads/2016/01/R-P-Partnerships-White-Paper-Jan-2013-Coburn-Penuel-Geil.pdf.

The term “research-practice partnership” was new to me, though the idea has resonated with me for some time. The term comes from many types of professional practice in which researchers and practitioners & administrative agents in the practice, develop a formal partnership to undertake research together. Coburn et al. list 5 defining characteristics of these partnerships:

The article describes and gives example of successful partnerships and goes into some detail about challenges and concludes with recommendations for researchers, practitioners and funders. The paper highlights one of the most challenging (and vexing problems) of educational research. Most educational researchers work at Universities. In these contexts some educational researchers play a double role in both professional and pre-development of teachers for the K12 world and in developing and supporting innovation and improvement in teaching and learning at their home universities. I’ve mostly been involved in the later having undertaken a number of major projects (most notably the Athabasca Landing, with Jon Dron).

The systematic problem in higher education is that innovations that are developed within education faculties have a terrible time of moving to production and systematic use outside of the pilot contexts in which they were developed. The system sort of works in that the educational researchers publish in their own research journals and compete with other social scientists in the University and nationally for research funds to continue development. However, this type of research is much more strategic and mission critical to the University, than most of the other research taking place at the University. I don’t wish to denigrate research in other disciplines, but the University itself has (or should have) a vested interest in continuously improving its educational practice – across all disciplines. However, to both colleagues and administration this educational research is usually seen as merely one more form of social science research and thus very few “practitioner-researcher partnerships” with the characteristics above result.

In the science, medicine and engineering contexts, partnerships between commercial firms and university researchers regularly arise and in Canada we have government programs to seed fund these ‘scientific’ partnerships. In addition there are programs to encourage work placements, early trials and other incentives for partnership development. In the K12 world some school divisions have also partnered with educational researchers but those that I have been involved with have had challenges related to publication rights, participant permissions and as always, funding shortages.

Some Universities are broadening their “Teaching and Learning” units to include a mandate for innovation, which could serve as a home for these partnerships. However, in most contexts that I have observed, the Teaching and Learning units are focused more on professional development, mentoring and in some cases short-term funding for projects or conferences . They usually have little interest or funding to champion the type of long-term “design-based research” that I believe is critical to both understand and then to implement and continually evaluate new educational pedagogies and technologies.

Jon Dron and my own work in building the Athabasca landing is a prime example of opportunity lost. The Landing is an Elgg-based social network, that is designed to grow “beyond the LMS” to give a networked home for the distributed university. However, to date we have been unsuccessful at building a “research-practice partnership” with the university. From the University’s perspective, the Landing is just another research project, owned and championed by two individual faculty. The University has no real strategy or desire to implement this or other educational initiatives, in a production capacity. Without this type of testing and if successful, guarantee of support and adoption across both administrative and academic units, the Landing, as social networking platform, has not and will never reach “critical mass”.

Huge opportunity lost…..

Design Based Research, educational social software, My Work research-practice partnership

End of Jobs in Online Education?

March 19, 2016Written by terrya

2 Comments

I started out my teaching career as a “shop teacher” – teaching middle school students how to work and built with a number of technologies. Thus, it was a bit disturbing to listen to recent CBC radio broadcast listing jobs that have disappeared and to hear that ‘shop teachers’ along with elevator operators, typists and postal worker were disappearing.

Two articles from the latest issue of Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, caught my attention for the same reason. Will technologies soon reduce or even eliminate the relatively new job position of “online teacher”.

The first article,

Vu, P., Fredrickson, S., & Meyer, R. (2016). Help at 3:00 AM! Providing 24/7 Timely Support to Online Students via a Virtual Assistant. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/vu_fredrickson_meyer191.html.

directly addresses the issue of substituting the traditional teacher role of answering student queries with a machine. The article notes that most online students do their work in the evening and on weekends when many teachers are not interested and often not available to answer questions. In an attempt to provide some sort of 7/24 service the instructors built a chat bot and seeded it with a database of questions culled from archives of questions asked by students taking the course in previous terms. Chat boots have rarely been used in education, though colleagues at Athabasca worked developing a Freudbot. But chat bots are becoming ubiquitous on online shopping sites where they provide a type of 7/24 customer support.

During the design-based research project the Bot was involved in 475 sets of interactions with the 56 students enrolled in 2 sections of an early Childhood Education course. As expected more than half of the interactions took place on weekends and 88% were during evenings. Of course some of the questions were ‘off topic” and used by curious students to learn the capabilities of the bot. But many were on topic with 65% of queries focussed on information seeking – much related to assignments and exams.

Of perhaps most interest was the students’ reactions, which were queried by 5 point Likert perception questions. Only about half (m=2.5) found the bot did effectively answer their question, but nearly all (m=4.8) noted the extra service provided 7/24 by the bot and over half (m=3.3) preferred asking the bot rather than emailing the teacher. The effectiveness of these type of bots naturally grows as the data base expands through use and the searching algorithms improve. Thus, one can, even now, see how machines will undertake at least some traditional teaching roles which in a positive sense can give teacher more time for more important learning diagnosis and help and reduce time spent on administrative type queries. It is also interesting to think about the “teaching presence” of of the female avatar (displayed at left) used in this study. In any case a very nice exploratory, design-based study.

The second employment related article compared adjunct teachers employed in for-profit universities as compared to those in the not-for-profit sector. This is an important problem as more than half of online courses in the USA are taught by part-time sessional instructors. This in itself has huge implications on job stability for teaching faculty, but the rise (in the US) of for-profit universities with a tradition of not offering tenured positions, doing no research and not training next generation of scholars is also threatening.

Starcher, K., & Mandernach, J. (2016). An Examination of Adjunct Faculty Characteristics: Comparison between Non-Profit and For-Profit Institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration,, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/starcher_mandernach191.html.

This study used an online survey to query 859 online adjunct teachers. The results were remarkable in the lack of statistical differences between the teachers at the two types of institution. No differences in age, satisfaction, education or a host of other variables. There were small differences in class size, but this was confounded by the higher percentage of graduate courses (with normally smaller numbers of students) in the public, not-for-profit universities.

The authors put a nice spin on the discussion by noting that the similarity means that professional development and support can be shared between the sectors – unlikely as that may be. But the study also adds empirical support to the notion that education can be and is being “privatized” with resulting decreasing employment for traditional, tenured faculty.

So what do I conclude from these two very good articles? I think one of the largest challenges for our global population (ranking right up there with climate change) is the capacity to meaningfully employ people in a context in which machines are more and more able to perform both mundane as well as high performance and high communication tasks. My Interaction Equivalency Theory speaks to this by noting the ways in which activity that used to be performed by live teachers (student-teacher interaction) can and is substituted by bots and canned media to create high quality student-content interaction.

Design Based Research, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory

Assessing teachers’ digital competencies

April 24, 2015Written by terrya

Definition of the word Competency highlighted with green marker.

I had the pleasure to spend a couple of days with faculty and students at the Centre for Educational Technology at Tallinn University here in Estonia. My host Mart Laanpere, showed me a number of very interesting projects. Driven by similar motives to our work on the Athabasca Landing , they have developed LePress system built on WordPress to expand learning opportunities, ownership and access “beyond the LMS”.

But what particularly caught my attention was an application created by Hans Põldoja (based on ELGG) that teachers can use to create a profile testing and documenting their digital competencies. The application, called DigiMina (DigitalMe in Estonian). is described in an article Poldoja, H., Väljataga, T., Laanpere, M., & Tammets, K. (2014). Web-based self- and peer-assessment of teachers’ digital competencies. World Wide Web, 17(2), 255-269. Or in a slideshow.

Most every school jurisdiction I know of has come to realize that teachers need (and many lack) the skills to use the net effectively to beneath both themselves as learners and their competence as effective teachers. The problem is that many teachers (and their administrative supervisors) don’t’ know what they don’t know!

To solve this problem, Hans and his Estonian colleagues scoured the net for organizations that have attempted to list basic competencies required for effective use of digital technologies. They soon realized most competency lists focused on general and uncontextualized skills, with little direct relevance to the particular contexts faced by practicing teachers. Finally, they selected the competency model developed in 2008 by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The model consists of five core competencies:

Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
Design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments
Model digital age work and learning
Promote and model digital-age citizenship and responsibility
Engaging in professional growth and leadership

For each of these 5 broad categories, they identified 5 particular competencies in increasing order of complexity. The particular competencies focused on “knowing how” to do some task, as opposed to “knowing what”. The challenging part, of course, comes when trying to identify these particular contexts in a broad enough context to be relevant to all (or nearly all) teachers, yet narrow enough to be contextually relevant. The lower level competencies were assessed using multiple choice or fill in the blanks test items (created to IMS QTI standard, of course). The higher level tasks required teachers to provide written statements, or more often links to web pages that give evidence of their competency. The Digima system then assigns these higher level items to peers for comment and assessment. At the completion of the assessment, a digital competency profile is created that gives evidence of their competencies (for self and/or administrative assessment) that can be embedded in the teachers’ own blogs or profiles, or school websites and provides direction for needed professional development.

Besides the utilitarian value I can see in this open source product, is the design process used in its creation and assessment. The Tallinn team used a design-based research with 4 slightly different phases than the four developed by Bannan-Ritland (2004) or Herrington, J., & Reeves, T. (2011) These are (1) contextual inquiry, (2) participatory design, (3) product design, and (4) production of software as hypothesis. I like Herrington and Reeves 3^rd stage as being testing in a local context (which was done by the Tallinn team) and 4^th stage as being development of design principles, rather than mere hypothesis. But the results are similar – a useful intervention validated in a real teaching/learning context. Testing (using survey items) with teachers showed generally positive results on questions related to usefulness and usability.

I would love to see such a system tested at scale by Canadian teachers.

Design Based Research, educational social software

Why you should do design based research (DBR)

January 20, 2015Written by terrya

In this post I’ll review and respond to two useful posts by Rebecca Hogue – Why you shouldn’t do Educational Design Research Part 1 and Part 2.

First of all I think the title is quite misleading, in that my reading of it provides amble reasons for doing DBR, in line with the literature. Perhaps I should allow a bit more literally license, but I expected the posts to be attacks on DBR itself as a mythology for doctoral student research. However, the series does highlight contexts and understandings which are inconsistent with DBR and thus is of significant value.

My second problem, is that Rebecca urges the readers to first read her article:

Hogue, R. J. (2013). Epistemological Foundations of Educational Design Research. Paper presented at the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education.

Unfortunately, she only provides the link to the article in the EdIT database, which charges for access. I was able to access it through my University, but I urge Rebecca and others to NOT submit her work to closed sources (if possible) and to post the article in open fashion if you must give copyright away. Let the copyright police get after you. The worst that can happen is a cease and desist order, unless the copy owner can proof significant economic loss from the infringement.

The first post notes the underlying epistemology of the DBR research paradigm. Pragmatism supports and defines DBR, action research, many “mixed methods designs” and some types of grounded theory. In the post, Rebecca does a great job of explaining the differences in research design, research questions and methodologies that do not create a ‘mismatch’, with the overarching research paradigm. She gives a good example of why students interested in the nature, phenomena or experience of learning, should be using interpretive paradigms and not pragmatic. One can easily provide additional examples of valid research questions that really are only a match with positivist or critical research paradigms. Both her article and this post provide amble evidence for the particular epistemological underpinnings (Pragmatism) that are associated and she argues, and I agree, are required of a DBR research project.

She goes on talk about the output of a “design” as itself being a valid research output. I also agree, but always urge my DBR students (from my own pragmatic world-view) to provide emperical evidence (qualitative and quantitive) that their design has or has not worked – that is as important a contribution to the research as is the design.

The second post is more “pragmatic” and gives 3 potential “show stoppers” which can derail a DBR research thesis.

The first deals with time and notes that a dissertation takes time and the problem should still be around when committee, ethics and a zillion other delays have been surmounted. I would add the converse, that DBR studies almost always involve multiple iterations. This is fine for an established academic to build a research agenda upon, but is nearly impossible for a DBR student who wants to graduate with the decade they begin!! In science a PhD student can often do a small piece of a research agenda being enacted within their supervisor’s “lab”. Unfortunately, in education due to funding problems and lack of clear and concrete identification and action on particular problems, doctoral students often have to create and define their own research problem and context.

Jan Herrington et al have addressed this issue in more detail see:

Herrington, J., McKenney, S., Reeves, T., & Oliver, R. (2007). Design-based research and doctoral students: Guidelines for preparing a dissertation proposal. Paper presented at the Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, Vancouver. Retrieved from http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/6762/

As an aside, note how the above article was published and likely owned by EdIT but there are 5 other versions (including the uRL above) of the article (mostly in University databases) available.

A final constraint that I would as is that the intervention must be feasible and cost effective. If one is designing for example a mobile app, one needs the resources to actually create a compelling app that likely needs to run on multiple operating systems. Without resources and time, the design may fail, not because it isn’t an effective design, just that it can’t be built within the contexts of the environment in which it is designed to operate. DBR is pragmatic in more than just the epistemological sense of the word.

Design Based Research, Open Scholarship

African Council for Distance Education 2014

June 8, 2014Written by terrya

4 Comments

African Council for Distance Education 2014

Zambezi Valley

I was honoured to be invited to do a keynote talk at the 4th conference of ACDE in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. After sitting up for 2 nights on a plane (42 hour journey) I was very glad to reach the Elephant Hills hotel and a soft bed. The hotel overlooks the Zambezi River and the constant myst of the Victoria Falls can be seen about 3 km away.

Mist rising from Victoria Falls

The next day I took a tour of the Falls, and they did not disappoint. They reminded me a lot of Niagara – maybe not so tall, but wider and the same deafening roar as millions of gallons of water churn over the cliff.

I did my talk the next day entitled ” Using Open Scholarship to Leapfrog Traditional Educational Barriers And it went OK, but the elaborate formal greetings and pomp of the opening ceremonies, meant that my time was really constrained- though I did manage to squeeze in a joke and give away a copy of one of our open access, Athabasca University Press, Issues in Dist. Educ. series books. The afternoon was spent at a very interesting workshop present by UNESCO and Fred Muller in which he challenged the Open Universities of Africa to embrace and develop MOOC applications- rather than fear them as we seem to do. I was very impressed with over 200 MOOCs put together by 13 European OpenUpEd collaborators as a service- not profit see openuped.eu.

Generally the African Open Universities are focussed on quality production of print packages and support (tutorials, testing etc) in local learning Centres. They suffer from the same prejudice from educated elites, and the faculties of traditional universities, but of course their costs are much lower. It is clear to all that sufficient campus universities will never be built to accommodate the large and growing demand for higher education in Africa. Many of the presenters presented compelling cases for more support, but also presented evidence of the changes that their programs are making in the lives of disadvantaged students. All the participants seem to have a sense that they should be using more net based technologies, but judging from the general absence of laptops by all but a few of the conference delegates, I think that net access and literacy is an issue not only for students but for faculty as well. This has been a very short trip, but the kindness of new friends and of the Zimbabwe people I have met here at the hotel is long!

Design Based Research, MOOCs, My Work, Open Scholarship

February 3, 2012Written by terrya

2 Comments

A problem with educational research publishing is that most of the most highly rated peer-reviewed journals are closed access, and though most are accessible to me through our library, I try as much as possible not to contribute to journals that are not available as open access. Especially in education, there are too many potential readers in schools, universities in developing countries and ordinary Canadians who just don’t have access to expensive closed publications. Thus, I strongly support the recent boycott of Elsevier (largest journal publisher in the world) but I extend a personal boycott it to all closed research publications (with the occasional exception).
However a year ago, I had an idea to research the impact of what for us in education was a new and i think very promising research methodology known as design-based research (DBR). The DBR model matches researchers with teachers in real educational contexts, to develop interventions (pedagogical technical, administrative etc.) and then test them in real contexts using a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques and then extracting broader design principles explaining how and why the intervention works or fails to improve teaching or learning.

I was fortunate enough to recruit Atahabasca University doctoral student Julie Shattuck and together we analysed the 5 most widely cited DBR articles over each of the ten years since the methodology was first promoted. You are welcome to read the results published this week

Terry Anderson and Julie Shattuck (2012) Design-Based Research : A Decade of Progress in Education Research? Educational Researcher, 41: 16-25,http://edr.sagepub.com/content/41/1/16.full

Once the article was written we were faced with the question of where to publish. I thought the article would have considerable interest -especially in the US, as this is where the majority of cited DBR articles were published. Thus, I wanted to go beyond the open and distance education audience that I normally write for. I immediately thought of Educational Researcher. This is arguably and usually cited as the most widely read and prestigious peer reviewed journal in the educational world (ISO Impact factor of 3.774), so I really didn’t think we would get accepted.
However, although Educational Researcher is published by Sage (a commercial publisher) it is sponsored by The American Educational Research Association (world’s largest professional educational group) and is distributed in paper to all its members and most importantly freely in PDF format on the web. So the prospect of a very large audience in a very prestigious journal and close to open access publication was irresistible.

The submission process was very picky and exacting, with editors demanding very strict adherence to APA format, page length etc. before they would even send it to review. Not to my surprise, two months later, it was returned with requests for revisions which I must say all reasonable and likely to improve the paper. However, the returned manuscript must go through a second review, so we didn’t get our hopes up. Then last summer, to our surprise, a very quick second review and minor suggestions for revisions and we were accepted!! 5 months later everyone is able to read the article online and I await my paper copy in the mail!
So thanks to Julie, the reviewers and editors at Educational Research and celebration time!!

Design Based Research, My Work, Open Scholarship design-based research, publication

AuPress to expand open access online learning publications

December 1, 2010Written by terrya

I am a big supporter of Open Access presses – largely because they serve potential readers without means or capacity to purchase books and as importantly, because they increase the readership and dissemination of ideas.

Athabasca University Press (AUPress) was Canada’s first open access, scholarly press, and provides all of its books for free download in PDF format and of course sells paper copies. These paper copies are offered for sale from the AUPress site, on Amazon and in epub format via sonybookstore. The download statistics for books and individual chapters are impressive and paper sales are about the same as scholarly publications from commercial or non open access scholarly publications.

For example my own edited book “Theory and Practice of Online Learning has been downloaded well over 90,000 times, read online by a large number of google book readers of the 20% offered at this site for free, and sales of over 1300 books. AUPress does pay royalties (about the same % of sales as commercial publishers). Interestingly I also got a small check from Copywrite Canada, from Universities who are paying for including chapters in reading packages- even though the students could download them for free!

I had a meeting with AUPress staff yesterday and we discussed ramping up production and promotion of the Issues in Distance Education series for which I serve as series editor. The series currently has 5 titles and 2 more “in press’.

If any readers are interested in producing a volume for this series, I hope you will contact me or the Press for author’s guidelines and further details. Like all AUPress books, each volume must survive two rigourous peer reviews. We are developing new guidelines for editors of edited volumes. The current practice is to accept publications only after the complete draft manuscript is submitted. This is problematic when an editor is trying to solicit chapter contributions and has no guarantee that the Press will accept the completed volume. However, an editor can communicate that the volume is being readied and hopefully published in open access format by AUPress, but there is no guarantee that any individual chapter or the whole book will survive the review process. The upside of this process is that a completed chapter or a book, can likely find an outlet someplace, even if fails AUPress’s review.

So please forward this post to any potential DE, online learning or even blended learning author wannabes and check out, download, or if you can afford it, order an AUPress book!

Design Based Research, Distance Education, My Work, Open Scholarship

Article on Social Networking in Self-Paced Instruction Published

September 16, 2010Written by terrya

2 Comments

I’m wallowing this morning in the short lived glory of an article published yesterday in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. My colleagues, Bruno Poellhuber (Univ of Montreal), Ross McKerlich and myself did a survey of students who enrolled in Athabasca in our self paced undergrad program in August 2009. We sent over 3,000 emial invitations and got survey response from over 950 – Not a great return, but not bad either for an online survey- with a draw for two iphones. The study was mant to measure the skills and interest of our students in a variety of social networking and to determine their interest in collaborative work in these individual learning designed programs. Here is the article abstract:

Social networking and communications tools have become widely used in entertainment and social applications and there is growing interest in their use in formal education applications. Distance education and especially those types that are based on self-paced programming models may be the biggest beneficiaries of the use of these new tools to provide previously unavailable capacity for student-student and student-teacher interaction. However, little is known about students’ interest, expectation and expertise using these tools. In this study the results of an online questionnaire (n=967) completed by undergraduate students enrolled in self-paced distance education programming are presented. The paper concludes that these students have very diverse views and experiences – however a majority are interested in using these tools to enhance their learning experiences. We also describe the relationship between expertise and expectation – the greater use and experience of learners, the more they expect and desire to have educational social software used in their formal education programming.

I was surprised at the generally low (but very mixed) self assessment of students in regards to their exposure and competency with various social media tools. As stereotype would predict, the younger males had a higher assessment of their own skills and assessment – but just maybe females assess themselves lower than their actual competencies.

We also noticed a very large split between those interested in collaboration and those who enroll in this type of programming with no expectation or desire to work with others. However the group of social learners is growing- and this even within a self-selected group of students who consciously pick this now rather unique form (continuous enrolment and no group pacing) form of online learning.

This work is part of a larger study aimed at developing real time (web cinferencign) and social networking (using elgg) interventions and assessing their value and adoption in self-paced learning modes of distance education.

Design Based Research, Distance Education, educational social software, My Work

Next Phase for Tom Reeves

March 31, 2010Written by terrya

It was a very pleasant honor to be able to attend the retirement celebration and Design Based Research conference Georgia that honoured the noted ed tech researcher, philosopher and activist – Tom Reeves.

The event was a very palatable love in for one of the most respect and loved academics in America. Tom has for 30 years been a professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Georgia. He has authored many articles, chapters and books, but is most known for his compelling presence as a speaker and advocate for meaningful research in education.

The conference featured a two day design based seminar and conference for grad students and researchers focused on methods and results of design-based research. There were key note talks by Jan Harrington (Australia), Susan McKenny (Netherlands), Mike Spector, Michael Hannifin and Tom (University of Georgia). There was also interesting mini sessions with scholars from Australia, Italy, South Africa and from across the USA.

I was pleased to hear of many cases where design research is being used n local contexts from higher education, to classrooms, to professional education – with promising results. I also was busy scribbling references and resources (notably the 2007 Introduction to Design Based Research booklet.) Tom’s own talk was both memories and inspiration as he demolished the focus on “rigour” that has marked the pendulum swing in the US as encapsulated in the No Child Left Behind and What Works thrusts of the Bush administration. Instead Tom championed, with many humorous and touching examples, the need for research that is relevant and makes a difference to real educators and most importantly real students.

There was a number of references for adding a fifth concurrent phase to design based research models based on a growing effort at understanding and promoting adoption of the design intervention in formal educational contexts.

I couldn’t help getting into a bit of a scrum with noted Ed tech author and publisher Michael Spector. Spector is the editor of the prestigious Journal Educational technology Research and Development, and the Handbook of Educational Technology, thus he is well positioned to present a “how to publish in Ed tech ” seminar. His talk ended with a listing of the 10″best” research journals in the ed tech field. However, only one of them was open access (Kinshuk’s Journal of Educational Technology & Society ). He dismissed all the other online journals as being of low quality. I had to jump up and dispute this claim and point out the growing list of Ed tech journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. I further noted that as long as senior scholars like himself, keep reinforcing the value and sending papers to closed publications, the majority of people on the earth will continue to be denied access to these works. It is especially relevant in that much of Tom’s talk focused on the lack of impact of ed tech research on real teachers and schools – perhaps because researchers who publish in closed journals effectively deny access to their work to the teachers who need and support their work.

The event ended in a tribute banquet, at which many of Tom’s current and former colleagues, friends and over 30 PhD students thanked Tom for the remarkable influence he has had on their lives. The event featured Jazz, blues and folk musicians and not just a few embarrassing stories dredged up from Tom’s past. Tom has traveled and spoken at all of the major educational conferences around the world, and there are few countries who cannot claim to have been influenced and blessed by Tom’s words and presence. Finally, I had my first tastes of southern grits and other southern delicacies as Tom and wife Trish opened their home for a farewell brunch.

Tom promises not to disappear in retirement and I doubt he will! I think he still has a few corny jokes and more than a few insights left for anyone looking for a keynote speaker at their next conference.

All the best Tom and thanks for a great career long, contribution to “research that matters”.

Design Based Research, My Work