Well another EDEN conference has been and come and gone and is lauded as a great success on its website.  But as usual it seemed to be all about new technostuff for even more glitzy teaching and, as usual, there didn’t seem to be a mention of the poor students on the receiving end of all this stuff or how most of them seem to be failing – victims of the ‘distance education deficit’.

Indeed it feels that distance educators at conferences seem to spend most of their time talking to each other about how wonderful the distance world is and how wonderful distance educators are with no reference to reality.

Ok, that’s very harsh.  There are many distance educators who are deeply concerned about retention and dropout.  But we need to make ourselves heard rather more.