I listened to an interview with Justin Reich on CBC's Spark this afternoon and heard basically a restatement of the criticisms of ed tech pundits (and especially people like Audrey Watters) and the solutions experienced designers have been proposing over the last few years. And if we ask why CBC would interview Reich over any of a hundred more qualified people, well, let's observe that he published a book and works for MIT, and that's all you need to know. This review of Reich's book by Michael B. Horn (one of those hundred people) echos my own sentiment (keeping in mind that I haven't read the book, there being no open access version online), calling it "a sensible, but hardly novel, appeal for 'methodological pluralism'." It's not clear how far Reich's research extends, as he described MOOCs as "simply a vehicle for traditional teacher-directed 'instructionism'." Horn also writes that Reich "misreads the most recent research on Teach to One" and "doesn't grapple with these more nuanced parts of the theory of disruptive innovation."
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