As Phil and I have been saying all along—most recently in my last post, which mentioned ECC’s use of adaptive learning—the software is, at best, an enabler. It’s the work that the students and teachers do around the software that makes the difference. Or not. In ECC’s case, they are trying to implement a pretty radical change in pedagogy with an at-risk population. It’s worth digging into the details.
The Fraught Interaction Design of Personalized Learning Products
David Wiley has a really interesting post up about Lumen Learning’s new personalized learning platform. Here’s an excerpt: A typical high-level approach to personalization might include: building up an internal model of what a student knows and can do, algorithmically interrogating that model, and providing the learner with a unique set of learning experiences based […]
68 Percent of Statistics Are Meaningless, Purdue University Edition
Purdue University has been happy to take credit for essentially inventing the retention early warning analytics category. But are they willing to take responsibility for putting out a flawed efficacy study? Eh, not so much.
Blackboard Acquires Large Latin American Moodle Provider
In my first post-BbWorld blog post, I noted that the international market is hugely important for Blackboard and Moodle is hugely important for their international strategy. Nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue and much of their growth comes from their international business, where they seem to be way ahead of their main North American […]
Blackboard: Ask and Ye Shall Receive (Better Answers)
About a week ago, I complained about Blackboard’s lack of clarity in messaging about their platform in general and the implications for managed hosting customers in particular. I wrote, in part, What is “Premium SaaS”? Is it managed hosting? Is it private cloud? What does it mean for current managed hosting customers? What we have […]
Blackboard’s Messaging Problems
There are a lot of things that are hard to evaluate from the outside when gauging how a company is doing under new management in the midst of a turnaround with big new products coming out. For example, how good is Ultra, Blackboard’s new user experience? (At least, I think the user experience is what […]
Blackboard Ultra and Other Product and Company Updates
Phil and I spent much of this past week at BbWorld trying to understand what is going on there. The fact that their next-generation Ultra user experience is a year behind is deservedly getting a lot of attention, so one of our goals going into the conference was to understand why this happened, where the […]