In part 1 of this series, I talked about some design goals for a conversation-based learning platform, including lowering the barriers and raising the incentives for faculty to share course designs and experiment with pedagogies that are well suited for conversation-based courses. Part 2 described a use case of a multi-school faculty professional development course […]
Blueprint for a post-LMS, Part 3
In the first part of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that supports conversation-based courses. In the second part, I brought up a use case of a kind of faculty professional development course that works as a distributed flip, based on our forthcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning. In […]
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2
In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses: Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress. Use scale appropriately in order […]
Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 1
Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind. CBE is loosely tied to family of pedagogical methods, perhaps the most […]
Unsubscribe
A little while back, e-Literate suddenly got hit by a spammer who was registering for email subscriptions to the site at a rate of dozens of new email addresses every hour. After trying a number of less extreme measures, I ended up removing the subscription widget from the site. Unfortunately, as a few of you […]
Greg Mankiw Thinks Greg Mankiw’s Textbook Is Fairly Priced
This is kind of hilarious. Greg Mankiw has written a blog post expressing his perplexity1 with The New York Times’ position that textbooks are overpriced: To me, this reaction seems strange. After all, the Times is a for-profit company in the business of providing information. If it really thought that some type of information (that […]
What Does Unizin Mean for Digital Learning?
Speaking of underpants gnomes sales pitches, Phil and I spent a fair amount of time hearing about Unizin at the ELI conference. Much of that time was spent hearing friends that I know, trust, and respect talk about the project. At length, in some cases. On the one hand, it is remarkable that, after these […]