I loved the title of Phil’s recent post, “Competency-Based Education: Not just a drinking game” because it acknowledges that, whatever else CBE is, it is also a drinking game. The hype is huge and still growing. I have been thinking a lot lately about Gartner’s hype cycle and how it plays out in academia. In […]
Keynote: The Year After the Year of the MOOC
Here’s a talk I gave recently at the CIT event in Duke. In addition to being very nice and gracious, the Duke folks impressed me with how many faculty they have who are not only committed to improving their teaching practices but dedicating significant time to it as a core professional activity. Anyway, for what […]
LinkedIn Releases College Ranking Service
I have long thought that LinkedIn has the potential to be one of the most transformative companies in ed tech for one simple reason: They have far more cross-institutional longitudinal outcomes data than anybody else—including government agencies. Just about anybody else who wants access to career path information of graduates across universities would face major […]
On False Binaries, Walled Gardens, and Moneyball
D’Arcy Norman started a lively inter-blog conversation like we haven’t seen in the edublogosphere in quite a while with his post on the false binary between LMS and open. His main point is that, even if you think that the open web provides a better learning environment, an LMS provides a better-than-nothing learning environment for […]
Pearson’s Efficacy Listening Tour
Back around New Year, Michael wrote a post examining Pearson’s efficacy initiative and calling on the company to engage in active discussions with various communities within higher education about defining “efficacy” with educators rather than for educators. It turns out that post got a fair bit of attention within the company. It was circulated in […]
What the Apple Watch Tells Us About the Future of Ed Tech
Nothing. So please, if you’re thinking about writing that post or article, don’t. I’m begging you.
Community Source Is Dead
As Phil noted in yesterday’s post, Kuali is moving to a for-profit model, and it looks like it is motivated more by sustainability pressures than by some grand affirmative vision for the organization. There has been a long-term debate in higher education about the value of “community source,” which is a particular governance and funding […]