Looking back at 2025, time has flown by and I have been much less active on this blog as in previous years. As hinted at already, some complications (private and health-related) have kept me busy and away from this blog. Hopefully, 2026 will see less of that and more of complications related to my research as these relations often spell relevations.
Anyway, to attempt and regain some momentum after again falling silent a few months, I plunge into the new year by announcing a publication: “Digitalisation before CoVid-19. The hype surrounding MOOCs as a window of opportunity for higher education knowledge transfer” (in its German original: “Digitalisierung vor Corona. Der Hype um die MOOCs als Möglichkeitsfenster für hochschuldidaktische Transferleistungen“).
It emerged from a research project different limits encountered in the knowledge transfer by higher education researchers I had to leave at the beginning of 2025 to pursue my current project, of which I will write some more in due time. Still, a co-worker and colleagues who had shared research duties with me took over full-time, and the article is a result of his work, incorporating bits and pieces I had written which gave me co-authorship. To not concoct long phrases such as the previous sentence, my colleague also took on editing duties, which makes for a quite readable text.
In a nutshell, our results show that knowledge gathered in higher education research is intrinsically relevant for practitioners (in teaching, learning, HEI administration and politics) but researchers struggle to find ways to make introduce their knowledge. This is due to a variety of reasons: Practitioners need knowledge that is very well catered to their concrete situation whilst researcher attempt to generalise; research into current problems needs time that practitiones who have to decide do not have; sometimes practicioners do not know about researchers, are lacking channels of communication to stumble across new insights and (especially in politics) have their own staff that does not do research but can collect different data into ‘executive summaries’.
The article was published in a journal on higher education management, which only offers a download of the whole issue, not individual articles. The whole issue is available here.
