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Emerging Market Reports: an EVA perspective

Moving on to explore Emerging Market Reports from https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522sept13/stage2/education-marketplace, I found the emerging market reports to differ greatly in their scope and geographical reach, as well as to differ as reports of primary research or reports of secondary research. The style of publication was also interesting.

Very capturing was Major Ed Tech Trends for 2013 by Online Colleges at http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2013/01/23/major-ed-tech-trends-for-2013/. The authors cleverly used an infographic to present ed-tech trends that they had located from edudemic.com and other sources. As an EVA, I found this infographic helpful.  It summarised key trends in an illustration that was very easy to read.  The colour coding was particularly helpful.

However, the ‘report’ has limitations.

Firstly, the writer of the article cannot be identified (the link for ‘staff writers’ doesn’t open up a page with details about writers).

Secondly, the source of data in the infographic is unknown. There is no specific reference to the page or pages on the edudemic.com site where the writers obtained any of the trend data, nor who on the edudemic.com site was the original writer or publisher. None of the data in the infographic has a citation.

Thirdly, the context for data is unknown. Without explanation or a source, the data is not contextualised to a location, state or country. We can assume it’s the USA, but there is no more detail than that as to what location and what sample was used to gather any data.

Fourthly, the references in the box at the end of the article, of which edudemic.com is one, do not provide proper reference details. They are simply home pages of websites (e.g. forbes.com).

In summary, as an EVA, I would need to do a lot of work to validate the findings of the article.

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