Graham Downes

• If the National Curriculum had not been introduced, compulsory education could be able to provide more diversity and choice in the future. • If the government abolished Ofsted, schools would be able to adopt more creative and risky approaches. • If SATs tests were abolished, children would be happier.…

Researchers have found evidence that student participation in asynchronous online learning can lead to higher order learning (Garrison and Garrison 2003), increased critical thinking (Szabo and Schwartz 2011) and enable a multidimensional process of assessment (Vonderwell et al. 2001). This paper explores the uses and potential benefits of assessed asynchronous…

Graham Downes and Peter Jones It is a common-place in Education Studies that education is increasingly subject to processes of marketization and commodification. This paper seeks to specify the nature of education as a commodity and explain how and why it both resists commodification and takes on, dialectically, a particular…