e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Efficacy, Adaptive Learning, and the Flipped Classroom, Part II

    In my last post, I described positive but mixed results of an effort by MSU’s psychology department to flip and blend their classroom:

    • On the 30-item comprehensive exam, students in the redesigned sections performed significantly better (84% improvement) compared to the traditional comparison group (54% improvement).
    • Students in the redesigned course demonstrated significantly more improvement from pre to post on the 50-item comprehensive exam (62% improvement) compared to the traditional sections (37% improvement).
    • Attendance improved substantially in the redesigned section. (Fall 2011 traditional mean percent attendance = 75% versus fall 2012 redesign mean percent attendance = 83%)
    • They did not get a statistically significant improvement in the number of failures and withdrawals, which was one of the main goals of the redesign, although they note that “it does appear that the distribution of A’s, B’s, and C’s shifted such that in the redesign, there were more A’s and B’s and fewer C’s compared to the traditional course.”
    • In terms of cost reduction, while they fell short of their 17.8% goal, they did achieve a 10% drop in the cost of the course….

    It’s also worth noting that MSU expected to increase enrollment by 72 students annually but actually saw a decline of enrollment by 126 students, which impacted their ability to deliver decreased costs to the institution.

    Those numbers were based on the NCAT report that was written up after the first semester of the redesigned course. But that wasn’t the whole story. It turns out that, after several semesters of offering the course, MSU was able to improve their DFW numbers after all:

    MSU DFWThat’s a fairly substantial reduction. In addition, their enrollment numbers have returned to roughly what they were pre-redesign (although they haven’t yet achieved the enrollment increases they originally hoped for).

    When I asked Danae Hudson, one of the leads on the project, why she thought it took time to see these results, here’s what she had to say:

    I do think there is a period of time (about a full year) where students (and other faculty) are getting used to a redesigned course. In that first year, there are a few things going on 1) students/and other faculty are hearing about “a fancy new course” – this makes some people skeptical, especially if that message is coming from administration; 2) students realize that there are now a much higher set of expectations and requirements, and have all of their friends saying “I didn’t have to do any of that!” — this makes them bitter; 3) during that first year, you are still working out some technological glitches and fine tuning the course. We have always been very open with our students about the process of redesign and letting them know we value their feedback. There is a risk to that approach though, in that it gives students a license to really complain, with the assumption that the faculty team “doesn’t know what they are doing”. So, we dealt with that, and I would probably do it again, because I do really value the input from students.

    I feel that we have now reached a point (2 years in) where most students at MSU don’t remember the course taught any other way and now the conversations are more about “what a cool course it is etc”.

    Finally, one other thought regarding the slight drop in enrollment we had. While I certainly think a “new blended course” may have scared some students away that first year, the other thing that happened was there were some scheduling issues that I didn’t initially think about. For example, in the Fall of 2012 we had 5 sections and in an attempt to make them very consistent and minimize missed classes due to holidays, we scheduled all sections on either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. I didn’t think about how that lack of flexibility could impact enrollment (which I think it did). So now, we are careful to offer sections (Monday through Thursday) and in morning and afternoon.

    To sum up, she thinks there were three main factors: (1) it took time to get the design right and the technology working optimally; (2) there was a shift in cultural expectations on campus that took several semesters; and (3) there was some noise in the data due to scheduling glitches.

    There are a number of lessons one could draw from this story, but from the perspective of educational efficacy, I think it underlines how little the headlines (or advertisements) we get really tell us, particularly about components of a larger educational intervention. We could have read, “Pearson’s MyPsychLabs Course Substantially Increased Students Knowledge, Study Shows.” That would have been true, but we have little idea how much improvement there would have been had the course not been fairly radically redesigned at the same time. We also could have read, “Pearson’s MyPsychLabs Course Did Not Improve Pass and Completion Rates, Study Shows.” That would have been true, but it would have told us nothing about the substantial gains over the semesters following the study. We want talking about educational efficacy to be like talking about the efficacy of Advil for treating arthritis. But it’s closer to talking about the efficacy of various chemotherapy drugs for treating a particular cancer. And we’re really really bad at talking about that kind of efficacy. I think we have our work cut out for us if we really want to be able to talk intelligently and intelligibly about the effectiveness of any particular educational intervention.

  • AAC&U GEMS Exemplar Practice Update

    A few weeks ago, I gave my example of the homework assignment for the AAC&U GEMS digital working group and invited you all to submit your own. Carrie Saarinen has written up her example of using blogging for essay writing—it happened to be medical students in her study, but it could just as easily have been Gen Ed—while Laura Gibbs wrote about using similar technologies to have students create “storybook web sites” for writing classes.

    Thanks to Carrie and Laura for these great examples. If anybody out there is still thinking about writing up their own example, it’s not too late to contribute.

  • Efficacy, Adaptive Learning, and the Flipped Classroom

    Speaking of efficacy and the complexity of measuring it, I had an interesting conversation the other day with Danae Hudson, a professor of Psychology at Missouri State University, about a course redesign effort that she participated in. The initial contact came from a P.R. firm hired by Pearson. Phil and I get a lot of these and turn down most of them. This one interested me for several reasons. First, it was an opportunity to talk directly to a faculty member who was involved in the project. (A tip to all you P.R. folks out there: You will have a better chance of getting our attention when the focus of the call is to put us in direct contact with your customers about what they are achieving.) Second, the project was facilitated by The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT). I am a big fan of NCAT’s work, despite the fact that they seem to have an almost pathological urge to sabotage efforts to bring their work the attention that they deserve. Pearson’s interest lab in the call was that MyPsychLab was an integral part of the course redesign. My interest was to see what I could learn about the interaction between educational technology products and educational practices in delivering educational efficacy.

    What I heard tended to confirm my suspicions (and common sense): Educational technology products can produce significant learning gains, but they often doing so by supporting changes in classroom practices.

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  • Efficacy Math is Hard

    David Wiley has a great post up on efficacy and OER in response to my original post about Pearson’s efficacy plan. He opens the piece by writing about Benjamin Bloom’s famous “2 sigma” problem:

    The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to drastically increasing learning. The two-part problem is that we don’t know how to drastically increase learning while holding cost constant. Many people have sought to create and publish “grand challenges” in education, but to my mind none will ever be more elegant than Bloom’s from 30 years ago:

    “If the research on the 2 sigma problem yields practical methods – which the average teacher or school faculty can learn in a brief period of time and use with little more cost or time than conventional instruction – it would be an educational contribution of the greatest magnitude.” (p. 6; emphasis in original)

    So the conversation can’t focus on efficacy only – if there were no other constraints, we actually know how to do “effective.” But there are other constraints to consider, and to limit our discussions to efficacy is to remain in the ethereal imaginary realm where cost doesn’t matter. And cost matters greatly.

    David then launches into a discussion of what he calls his “golden ratio,” or standard deviations per dollar. I have long been a fan of this formulation and quote it frequently. I’m not going to try to summarize his explication of it in his post; you really should go read it. But I would like to tease out a few implications here.

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  • Why VCs Usually Get Ed Tech Wrong

    I don’t often get to write these words, but there is a new must-read blog post on educational technology by a venture capitalist. Rethink Education’s Matt Greenfield argues that there is no generalized bubble in ed tech investment; rather, the problem is that the venture community has a habit of systematically betting on the wrong horses.

    It’s worth noting that Matt is not your typical VC. For starters, he doesn’t live in the Valley echo chamber. Perhaps more importantly, he has a background as an academic. He has a PhD in English from Yale, taught at Bowdoin and CUNY, and taught graduate classes in literature to teachers from the New York City public schools. As such, he has an unusual perspective for an ed tech venture capitalist.

    Matt uses digital textbook platforms as his example of the problem he wants to highlight:

    What type of ed tech have venture capitalists approached with the greatest enthusiasm and the largest piles of cash? The answer is new textbook solutions, including digital textbook platforms like Kno and renters of physical textbooks like Chegg, which just went public. Venture capitalists have put over $500 million into just the top ten companies in this sector….

    I talked to the CEO of an academic bookstore company recently. How many digital textbook platforms would you guess that his stores handle? Five? No, more than that. Ten? Nope, guess again. Twenty? Still too low. The answer is forty-two different digital textbook platforms. Forty-two. Now try to imagine each of those textbook platform companies pitching a book store. Or an author. Or a publisher. Or a venture capitalist. “Choose my platform, choose me! Our platform is totally different!” How many of those platforms does the world really need? How many of those platforms can make money? What do you think the meaningful differences between those forty-two platforms might be?…Meanwhile, even the century-old publishing incumbents are moving away from book-like things to adaptive courseware: learning objects that simply will not fit into the wrappers being built by companies like Kno.

    So there is a bubble in venture funding for education ventures that are obsolete at birth. Meanwhile, there are large opportunities in areas where few venture capitalists will invest.

    This is a fascinating case study. Why would VCs, with their much vaunted drive for innovation, be so taken with the idea of rebuilding an aging instructional modality (i.e., the textbook) on a digital platform—particularly when, as Matt spells out in detail in his blog post, it’s clearly a bad bet for a lot of reasons? It’s worth unpacking this a bit to get at the underlying pathology.

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  • New e-Literate TV Episode: Flipped Classrooms and Team-based Course Design

    In our final episode of the pilot series, Phil interviews George Washington University Chair and Associate Professor of Marketing Vanessa Perry about her experiences developing a flipped class, with a focus on the team course development effort. Long-time followers of the blog know that Phil and I think the transition to team-based course design is both a major barrier and a major inflection point for institutions moving into digital education.

    Check it out.

  • New e-Literate TV Episode: Adaptive Learning and Learning Analytics

    In our latest episode, the penultimate in the pilot series, we explore the topics that are likely to be moving up the curve of the hype cycle this year—adaptive learning and learning analytics.  Like many of the topics in the pilot series, we could have made an entire series about this one. (And maybe we will at some point.) But since the first adaptive learning product faculty will run into is most likely to be from a textbook publisher, we interviewed McGraw Hill’s Al Essa and Pearson’s Jason Jordan about their respective takes on what this trend is all about.

    Here it is.