e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard’s Big News that Nobody Noticed

    This week was both D2L’s FUSION conference and Blackboard’s BbWorld. The conventional wisdom going around is that there was no big news out of either conference. In Blackboard’s case, that’s just not true. In fact, there was an astonishing amount of very significant news. It’s just that Blackboard didn’t do a very good job of explaining it to people. And that, by itself, is also news.

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  • NPR and Missed (Course) Signals

    Anya Kamenetz has a piece up on NPR about learning analytics, highlighting Purdue’s Course Signals as its centerpiece. She does a good job of introducing the topic to a general audience and raising some relevant ethical questions. But she missed one of the biggest ethical questions surrounding Purdue’s product—namely, that some of its research claims are likely false. In particular, she repeats the following claim:

    Course Signals…has been shown to increase the number of students earning A’s and B’s and lower the number of D’s and F’s, and it significantly raises the chances that students will stick with college for an additional year, from 83% to 97%. [Emphasis added.]

    Based on the work of Mike Caulfield and Al Essa summarized in the link above, it looks like that latter claim is probably the result of selection bias rather than a real finding. So who is at fault for this questionable claim being repeated without challenge in a popular venue many months after it has been convincingly challenged?

    For starters, Purdue is. They never responded to the criticism, despite confirmation that they are aware of it—for one thing, they got contacted by us and by Inside Higher Ed—and despite the fact that they apparently continue to make money off the sales of the product through a licensing deal with Ellucian. And the uncorrected paper is still available on their web site. This is unconscionable.

    Anya clearly bears some responsibility too. Although it’s easy to assume from the way the article is written that the dubious claim was repeated to her in an interview by Purdue research Matt Pistilli, she confirmed for me via email that she took the claim from the previously published research paper and did not discuss it with Pistilli. Given that this is her central example of the potential of learning analytics, she should have interrogated this a little more, particularly since she had Matt on the phone. Mike Caulfield also commented to me that any claim of such a dramatic increase in year-to-year retention should automatically be subject to additional scrutiny.

    I have to put some blame on the higher ed press as well. Inside Higher Ed covered the story (and, through them, the Times Higher Education). In fact, Carl Straumsheim actually advanced the story a bit by putting the question to researcher Matt Pistilli (who gave a non-answer). The Chronicle of Higher Education did not cover it, despite having run a puff piece on Purdue’s claims the same day that Mike Caulfield wrote his original piece challenging the results. It is very clear to Phil and me that we are read by the Chronicle staff, in part because they periodically publish stories that have been obviously influenced by our earlier coverage. Sometimes without attribution. I don’t care that much about the credit, but if they thought Purdue’s claims were newsworthy enough to cover in the first place then they should have done their own reporting on the fact that those claims have been called into question. If they had been more aggressive in their coverage then the mainstream press reporters who find Course Signals will be more likely to find the other side(s) of the story as well. Outside of IHE, I’m having trouble finding any coverage, never mind any original reporting, in the higher ed or ed tech press.

    I have a lot of respect for news reporters in general, and I think that most people grossly underestimate how hard the job is. I think highly of Anya as a professional. I like the reporters I interact with most at the Chronicle as well. Nor will I pretend that we are perfect here at e-Literate. We miss important angles and get details wrong our fair share. For example, I doubt that I would have caught the flaw in Purdue’s research if Mike hadn’t brought it to my attention. But collectively, we have to do a better job of providing critical coverage of topics like learning analytics, particularly at a time when so much money is being spent and our entire educational system is starting to be remade on the premise that this stuff will work. And there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for a research university to not take responsibility for their published research on a topic that is so critical to the future of universities.

  • Blackboard’s Perceptis Acquisition Offers Clues into Company’s Strategy

    Yesterday Blackboard announced that they acquired Perceptis, a provider of help desk and financial aid support services for colleges and universities. In and of itself, this is not a huge acquisition. Perceptis has 33 clients, offers services that Blackboard was already offering, and has no substantial new technology. But as we approach BbWorld next week, the move provides some early hints into the strategic direction that the company may highlight at the conference.

    I had the opportunity to talk with Blackboard’s Vice President of Education Services Katie Blot about the move.

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  • “Personalized Learning” Is Redundant

    Dan Meyer has just published a provocative post called “Don’t Personalize Learning,” inspired by an even more provocative post with the same title by Benjamin Riley (as well as being a follow-up to Meyer’s post “Tools for Socialized Instruction not Individualized Instruction“). Part of the confound here is sloppy terminology. Specifically, I think the term “personalized learning” doesn’t really mean anything, so it’s hard to have an intelligent conversation about it.

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  • Happy Birthday, e-Literate

    Ten years ago today, I wrote my first blog post on e-Literate. At the time, my only real ambitions were to learn about blogging and use the fact that I was writing in public to force myself to think more clearly about what I believed about educational technologies. I never could have imagined that, not only would I still be writing a decade later, but that it would be come such a large and important part of my professional and personal life. I have met many wonderful people and had unbelievable opportunities as a result of this blog.

    At the beginning of my career as an educator, I was a middle school and high school teacher. I am the son of teachers, brother of teachers, husband of a teacher, and father-in-law of a teacher. I still consider myself to be a teacher. I particularly loved teaching 8th grade and plan to go back to it someday. Occasionally I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by doing what I do now instead of going back to the classroom immediately. But then I run into people like Jon and Chris Boggiano at someplace like the GSV conference. These two brothers enlisted in the army after 9/11, went to West Point, and served in active combat duty in places like Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. After they got out of the Army, they turned down lucrative careers in corporate America to create a startup training veterans and other folks in green jobs. They were recognized by the White House for their success. They then sold their startup, enrolled in graduate school in Stanford together, used their proceeds to become educational technology angel investors, and are busy planning their next startup. Here’s a video of them in action, presenting their thoughts on childhood and educational philosophy at a Stanford event:

    One more thing: Jon and Chris are my former seventh and eighth grade students.

    Their choices make me feel better about mine. If they think that developing technology in the service of education is a good way to try to change the world, then I am going to do everything I can to help them and people like them. I don’t always trust my judgment about what’s the best thing to do for our future, but I trust theirs.

    They are also a reminder that we often don’t know the consequences of the actions we take. I was absolutely stunned to see their names on the attendee list for the ed tech conference, but I also felt incredibly proud. Jon and Chris deserve 100% credit for who they have become and what they have accomplished, but I feel privileged to have played a small part in their grand adventure.

    And in that spirit, I want to ask you all if you might consider giving e-Literate a birthday present. When Phil and I write our blog posts, we are in our respective homes. Maybe we talk to each other a little bit about what we’re writing, but it’s mostly a solitary experience. We get sporadic feedback, often long after we have written our pieces. We get some idea of what people are thinking by the comments and the web traffic, but we don’t know if what we’re doing really matters. So if something we’ve written here has made a difference, if there was a decision you made differently or some post that influenced your thinking, we’d be grateful if you would let us know in comments or in email. It would mean a great deal to us to know that we’ve had even a small impact.

    Thanks for sticking with us, and I hope that you will still find us worth reading ten years from now.

  • Starbucks Paying for Employees Tuition at ASU Online

    This is a big deal:

    Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on Monday.

    The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free, with government and university aid.

    Over the past few decades, America has slowly but surely been transitioning from a system in which college education was treated as a public good (and therefore subsidized by taxpayers) to being a private good (and therefore paid for entirely by students and their families). And while there is no substitute for that model, it is interesting and important that Starbucks is positioning college tuition the way companies position health insurance plans—as a benefit they use to compete for better workers. America is caught in a negative loop about insurance, if you look at Europe, where you only need to renew your EU card and peace of mind is yours. Why can’t we be so human?

    This is not an entirely new idea. Many companies have tuition reimbursement, although it often comes with more restrictions and is typically aimed at white-collar workers. A while back, Wal-Mart made headlines by offering heavily subsidized (but not free) college credit in partnership with APU. Starbucks takes this to the next level. Since both Wal-Mart and Starbucks have reputations as union busters, it will be interesting to see how their respective college subsidization moves impact their struggles with their labor forces. Will tuition help them lower demand for unionization? Will it become another bargaining chip at the negotiating table?

    I wrote a while back about the idea of reviving the apprenticeship for the digital age and gave an example of an Indian tech company that is doing it. I think we’re going to see a lot more of variations on the theme of employer-funded education in the future.

    You can learn more about the Starbucks college program at their website.

  • It’s Official: Unizin Is Real

     

    A giant deity from the confines of space and time, Unizin has orbited the Earth like a comet, appearing once every twelve years of Christmas Eve. One man by the name of Dr. Kori wanted to study Unizin after seeing the monster himself when he was a boy. Even though he was called a con artist trying to capture Unizin he never gave up his search. On Christmas Eve day, he was working on his self made radar that would find Unizin when Elly came and was shocked by the device. After Dr. Kori repaired her the two made a trap to capture Unizin. That night, the dimensional kaiju made himself known as both DASH and Dr. Kori captures it in a mystical trap, but time around him began to disappear. Kaito turned into Ultraman Max and made a barrier to slow down the process. Not wanting the graceful giant to be hurt Dr. Kori let it go, restoring everything to normal. Unizin gave the doctor the branch of a tree he had not seen in some time, whether it was intended to be given to him or a reward for releasing him was unknown, but he was grateful nonetheless.

    – The Ultraman Wiki

    No, not that Unizin. This Unizin. The secret university consortium is no longer secret. Phil and I wrote a few posts about the consortium before the group went public:

    So far, four of the ten universities we reported were considering joining have officially and publicly joined: Indiana University, University of Michigan, Colorado State University, and University of Florida.

    Here’s a roundup of the news coverage:

    Probably most important to read, in addition to IHE’s coverage and ours, is the “Why Unizin?” blog post on the Unizin website.

    There was a press call this afternoon, so I expect we will be seeing more articles over the next few days. Of course, Phil and I will be providing some additional analysis as well. Stay tuned.