Why MOOCs Fail

A recent article in the New York Times has highlighted a number of disturbing statistics that shake the current craze for those free online educational courses known as MOOCs. Basically put, an appalling number of students are dropping out. MOOCs are being abandoned in droves. But why is this happening […]


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What Teachers Say (TEFAL)

Teachers mess up as well. Many of us have spent time teaching in a foreign country and grappling with the problems of the local language. Here are a few problems which arise:     A class were playing a word game where they had to explain a word to the […]


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What Students Say (TEFAL)

The following gems were picked up over the years by English teachers around the world. The interesting thing is that if you look at them, often they make profound sense in a strange way. Comments like When I grow up I’d like to be a kindergartener do somehow ring true. […]


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Vowels to Bosnia (TEFAL)

During the war in the Balkans (1992-1995), much was made of the spelling and pronunciation of place names in Serbia and so on. This satirical news item was popular at the time. Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced US plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels […]


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This Will Revolutionize Teaching

For years they’ve been telling us that new technology will revolutionize teaching. First it was film. Then radio. Then TV. Then video. Then computers. Then MOOCs… And they were wrong. Wrong every time. Wrong all the time. In this insightful video from Derek Muller he explains that the reason why […]


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