e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • 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 important of which at the moment is mastery learning. In contrast, questions about why general LMSs aren’t “better” beg the question, “Better for what?” Since conversations of LMS design are usually divorced from conversations of learning design, we end up pretending that the foundational design assumptions in an LMS are pedagogically neutral when they are actually assumptions based on traditional lecture/test pedagogy. I don’t know what a “better” LMS looks like, but I am starting to get a sense of what an LMS that is better for CBE looks like. In some ways, the relationship between platform and pedagogy is similar to the relationship former Apple luminary Alan Kay claimed between software and hardware: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” It’s hard to separate serious digital learning design from digital learning platform design (or, for that matter, from physical classroom design). The advances in CBE platforms are a case in point.

    But CBE doesn’t work well for all content and all subjects. In a series of posts starting with this one, I’m going to conduct a thought experiment of designing a learning platform—I don’t really see it as an LMS, although I’m also not allergic to that term as some are—that would be useful for conversation-based courses or conversation-based elements of courses. Because I like thought experiments that lead to actual experiments, I’m going to propose a model that could realistically be built with named (and mostly open source) software and talk a bit about implementation details like use of interoperability standards. But all of the ideas here are separable from the suggested software implementations. The primary point of the series is to address the underlying design principles.

    In this first post, I’m going to try to articulate the design goals for the thought experiment.

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  • 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 have since pointed out to me, by removing the option to subscribe by email, I also inadvertently removed the option to unsubscribe. Once I realized there was a problem (and cleared some time to figure out what to do about it), I investigated a number of other email subscription plugins, hoping that I could find one that is more secure. After some significant research, I came to the conclusion, that there is no alternate solution that I can trust more than the one we already have.

    The good news is that I discovered the plugin we have been using has an option to disable the subscribe feature while leaving on the unsubscribe feature. I have done so. You can now find the unsubscribe capability back near the top of the right-hand sidebar. Please go ahead and unsubscribe yourself if that’s what you’re looking to do. If any of you need help unsubscribing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

    Sorry for the trouble. On a related note, I hope to reactivate the email subscription feature for new subscribers once I can find the right combination of spam plugins to block the spam registrations without getting in the way of actual humans trying to use the site.

  • Greg Mankiw Thinks Greg Mankiw’s Textbook Is Fairly Priced

    This is kind of hilarious.

    Greg Mankiw has written a blog post expressing his perplexity ((Hat tip to Stephen Downes for the link.)) 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 is, textbooks) was vastly overpriced, wouldn’t the Times view this as a great business opportunity? Instead of merely editorializing, why not enter the market and offer a better product at a lower price? The Times knows how to hire writers, editors, printers, etc. There are no barriers to entry in the textbook market, and the Times starts with a pretty good brand name.

    My guess is that the Times business managers would not view starting a new textbook publisher as an exceptionally profitable business opportunity, which if true only goes to undermine the premise of its editorial writers.

    It’s worth noting that Mankiw received a $1.4 million advance for his economics textbook from his original publisher Harcourt Southwestern, which was later acquired by the company now known as Cengage Learning. That was in 1997. Now in its seventh edition, Mankiw has five different versions of his book published by Cengage (not counting the five versions of the previous edition, which is still on the market). That said, he is probably right that NYT would not view the textbook industry as a profitable business opportunity. But think about that. A newspaper finds the textbook industry unattractive economically. The textbook industry is imploding. Mankiw’s publisher just emerged from bankruptcy, and textbook sales are down and still dropping across the board.

    One reason that textbook prices have not been responsive to market forces is that most faculty do not have strong incentives to search for less expensive textbooks and, to the contrary, have high switching costs. They have to both find an alternative that fits their curriculum and teaching approach—a non-trivial investment in itself—and then rejigger their course design to fit with the new book. A second part of the problem is that the publishers really can’t afford to lower the textbook prices at this point without speeding up their slow-motion train crash because their unit sales keep dropping as students find more creative ways to avoid buying the book. Their way of dealing with falling sales is to raise the price on each book that they sell. It’s a vicious cycle—one that could potentially be broken by the market forces that Mankiw seems so sure are providing fair pricing if only the people making the adoption decisions had motivations that were aligned with the people making the purchasing decisions. The high cost of switching for faculty, coupled with their relative personal immunity to pricing increases, translate into a barrier to entry for potential competitors looking to underbid the established players. Which brings me to the third reason. There are plenty of faculty who would like to believe that they could make money writing a textbook someday and that doing so would generate enough income to make a difference in their lives. Not all, not most, and probably not even the majority, but enough to matter. As long as faculty can potentially get compensated for sales, there will be motivation for them to see high textbook prices that they don’t have to pay themselves as “fair” or, at least, tolerable. It’s a conflict of interest. And Greg Mankiw, as a guy who’s made the big score, has the biggest conflict of interest of all and the least motivation of anyone to admit that textbook prices are out of hand, and that the textbook “market” he wants to believe in probably doesn’t even properly qualify as a market, never mind an efficient one.

  • 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 long conversations, I am not much clearer on the purpose of Unizin than I was the week before. On the other hand, being reminded that some of my friends really believe in this thing helped me refill my reservoir of patience for the project, which had frankly run dry.

    Alas, that reservoir was largely drained away again during a Unizin presentation with the same title as this blog post. I went there expecting the presenters to answer that question for the audience.

    Alack.

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  • Wanted – A Theory of Change

    Phil and I went to the ELI conference this week. It was my first time attending, which is odd given that it is one of the best conferences that I’ve attended in quite a while. How did I not know this?

    We went, in part, to do a session on our upcoming e-Literate TV series, which was filmed for use in the series. (Very meta.) Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz did a fantastic job of both facilitating and participating in the conversation. I can’t wait to see what we have on film. Phil and I also found that an usually high percentage of sessions were ones that we actually wanted to go to and, once there, didn’t feel the urge to leave. But the most important aspect of any conference is who shows up, and ELI did not disappoint there either. The crowd was diverse, but with a high percentage of super-interesting people. On the one hand, I felt like this was the first time that there were significant numbers of people talking about learning analytics who actually made sense. John Whitmer from Blackboard (but formerly from CSU), Mike Sharkey from Blue Canary (but formerly from University of Phoenix), Rob Robinson from Civitas (but formerly from the University of Texas), Eric Frank of Acrobatiq (formerly of Flat World Knowledge)—these people (among others) were all speaking a common language, and it turns out that language was English. I feel like that conversation is finally beginning to come down to earth. At the same time, I got to meet Gardner Campbell for the first time and ran into Jim Groom. One of the reasons that I admire both of these guys is that they challenge me. They unsettle me. They get under my skin, in a good way (although it doesn’t always feel that way in the moment).

    And so it is that I find myself reflecting disproportionately on the brief conversations that I had with both of them, and about the nature of change in education.

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  • e-Literate TV Case Study Preview: Middlebury College

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Phil and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. Both our preview posts and the series itself start with Middlebury College. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. And as part of our effort to establish a more objective frame, we started the series by going not to a school that was a Gates Foundation grantee but to the kind of place that Americans probably think of first when they think of a high-quality personalized education outside the context of technology marketing. We decided to go to an elite New England liberal arts college. We wanted to use that ideal as the context for talking about personalizing learning through technology. At the same time, we were curious to find out how technology is changing these schools and their notion of what a personal education is.

    We picked Middlebury because it fit the profile and because we had a good connection through our colleagues at IN THE TELLING. ((Full disclosure: Since filming the case study, Middlebury has become a client of MindWires Consulting, the company that Phil and I run together.)) We really weren’t sure what we would find once we arrived on campus with the cameras. Some of what we found there was not surprising. In a school with a student/teacher ratio of 8.6 to 1, we found strong student/teacher relationships and empowered, creative students. Understandably, we heard concerns that introducing technology into this environment would depersonalize education. But we also heard great dialogues between students and teachers about what “personalized” really means to students who have grown up with the internet. And, somewhat unexpectedly, we saw some signs that the future of educational technology at places like Middlebury College may not be as different from what we’re seeing at public colleges and universities as you might think, as you’ll see in the interview excerpt below.

    Jeff Howarth is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Middlebury. He teaches a very popular survey-level course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). But it’s really primarily a course about thinking about spaces. As Jeff pointed out to me, we typically provide little to no formal education on spacial reasoning in primary and secondary schooling. So the students walking into his class have a wide range of skills, based primarily on their natural ability to pick them up on their own. This broad heterogeneity is not so different from the wide spread of skills that we saw in the developmental math program at Essex County College in Newark, NJ. Furthermore, the difference between a novice and an expert within a knowledge domain is not just about how many competencies they have racked up. It’s also about how they acquire those competencies. Jeff did his own study of how students learn in his class which confirmed broader educational research showing that novices in a domain tend to start with specific problems and generalize outward, while experts (like professors, but also like more advanced students) tend to start with general principles and apply them to the specific problem at hand. As Jeff pointed out to me, the very structure of the class schedule conspires against serving novice learners in the way that works best for them. Typically, students go to a lecture in which they are given general principles and then are sent to a lab to apply those principles. That order works for students who have enough domain experience to frame specific situations in terms of the general principles but not for the novices who are just beginning to learn what those general principles might even look like.

    When Jeff thought about how to serve the needs of his students, the solution he came up with—partly still a proposal at this point—bears a striking resemblance to the basic design of commercial “personalized learning” courseware. I emphasize that he arrived at this conclusion through his own thought process rather than by imitating commercial offerings. Here’s an excerpt in which he describes deciding to flip his classroom before he had ever even heard of the term:

    In the full ten-minute episode, we hear Jeff talk about his ideas for personalized courseware (although he never uses that term). And in the thirty-minute series, we have a great dialogue between students and faculty as well as some important context setting from the college leadership. The end result is that the Middlebury case study shows us that personalized learning software tools do not just have to be inferior substitutes for the real thing that are only for “other people’s children” while simultaneously reminding us of what a real personal education looks like and what we must be careful not to lose as we bring more technology into the classroom.

  • A Sneak Preview of e-Literate TV at ELI

    Phil and I will be chatting with Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz about our upcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning in a featured session at ELI tomorrow. We’ll be previewing short segments of video case studies that we’ve done on an elite New England liberal arts college, an urban community college, and large public university. Audience participation in the discussion is definitely encouraged. It will be tomorrow at 11:45 AM in California C for those of you who are here at the conference, and also webcast for those of you registered for the virtual conference.

    We hope to see you there.