e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Outcomes-Based Education and the Conservative Radicalism of the AAC&U

    I have been invited to participate on the Digital Working Group of the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U’s) General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) program. (As we will see, AAC&U loves its acronyms.) GEMs is a really interesting project made even more interesting because of who is doing it. AAC&U is a fundamentally conservative organization in the sense that their purview is to help conserve that which is valuable and distinctive about the American college education. GEMs is part of a larger alphabet soup of AAC&U initiatives that are clearly about outcomes-based education and arguably about competency-based education (CBE). (For more on the distinction between these two, see Phil’s earlier blog post on the subject.) The organization’s leadership is frank about the fact that these have been at least partly defensive moves; given all the pressure for increasing accountability, the Association felt that academics should lead the charge on defining what that should mean before others define it for them. (GEMs is the latest in a series of related efforts to that end.) But the trail they are blazing has the potential to be pretty radical. Maybe even more radical than the organization has fully come to grips with.

    I’m going to be doing some of my homework for the working group here on the blog in future posts, but before I do that, I’d like to take the time in this one to outline what I understand to be the goal and context of GEMs. Fair warning: I’m not sure that my understanding is correct. I am new to AAC&U and, to be honest, they were not terribly good at articulating the goals for GEMs at the first summit. (I am not the only participant who had trouble parsing the goals and priorities.) With any luck, some AAC&U veterans will read this and correct any mistakes I make along the way.

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  • New e-Literate TV Episode – CourseWare: What Comes After the Textbook

    We’ve just published our fourth episode in the e-Literate TV pilot series. This one is about CourseWare. Frequent e-Literate readers will know that this is a topic Phil and I think is important and growing in importance. You’re most likely to have heard of the products from the big publishers—Pearson’s CourseConnect, McGraw Hill’s SmartBooks, Cengage’s MindTap, and Wiley’s WileyPLUS—but there are also a lot of smaller entrants that are worth paying attention to.

    For this episode, I got to interview two of my favorite people in ed tech: Soomo Publishing’s David Lindrum and Lumen Learning’s Kim Thanos. Both of these folks run small companies that are doing good and novel work with the courseware product category without having huge technology budgets or whizzy adaptive engines. And they have some really interesting things to say about how the advent courseware changes the way we have to approach the development of curricular materials.

    Take a look.

  • New e-Literate TV Episode: MOOC Mania

    We have just published our third episode in the first ETV series—an interview with Stanford University’s Amy Collier about MOOCs. As is often the case with these episode, there are lots of different angles we could have taken. This episode is really the answer to a colleague who asks, “What is this thing that Tom Friedman has been talking about?” Amy does a terrific job of delivering a hype (and anti-hype) antidote.

    Take a look.

    We’ll have broader coverage in the full series about MOOCs we’ll be releasing after this current one, developed from the interviews that Phil and I conducted at the MOOC Research Initiative Conference.

  • Another e-Literate TV Episode is Up

    The other day, I wrote a post about community-negotiated focus and how we want e-Literate TV to be a kind of “choose your own adventure in ed tech” experience, both for individuals and for campus communities. You can get a sense of how we’re trying to do that in the first series with Phil’s interview of Inside Higher Education Editors Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik. They talk about the changing landscape of education, why different topics in educational technology come up in the first place, and how the ways in which those topics are raised can have either a positive or a negative impact. This is the anchor episode for the series and is intended to provoke discussion that would lead to the group finding a focus in their collaborative ed tech investigation that’s important to them.

    Take a look.

  • e-Literate TV and Community-Negotiated Focus

    The goal of e-Literate TV (ETV) is to help school communities develop a working consensus around how they can use learning technologies to achieve important educational goals. For example, we’d like to be able to help schools that are motivated to improve student retention to identify appropriate ways that technology can help them do that. To do that, we have to do more than just provide relevant information. We have to provide it in a structure that encourages a productive culture of conversation and consensus building about these sorts of issues. It’s education as change management.

    In order to make ETV useful in that way, we’re developing (inventing? rediscovering?) a number of design principles. The first one, which I’ve written about before, is differentiated engagement. The ways in which deans, advising faculty, non-advising faculty, technology support staff, and other stakeholders need to be involved in a conversation about, for example, adopting a retention early warning system are different, as are the needs and interests of different individuals who have these roles. With the layered, hyper- and transmedia approach that we are able to take with our episodes, we can invite people to participate in the ways and to the degrees that are appropriate for them. We can help them find their zones of proximal curiosity, encouraging them to explore the issues a little further than they might have on their own while also recognizing that each individual is going to have limitations on how much they need or want to know.

    A second design principle we’re exploring is what we can call “community-negotiated focus.” Every school community is going to have its own collective zone of interest within a given topic. For example, Berkshire Community College may only be interested in MOOCs in cases where they are being used in an attempt to support remedial students or underserved populations, while Colorado State University Pueblo may be interested in how MOOCs are being used to flip classrooms and related labor issues. Once again, one size does not fit all. Phil’s recent post about our commitment to release the ETV videos under a Creative Commons license is intimately related to our goal of enabling ETV to be a resource that particular academic communities can customize to serve their particular needs.

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  • The First e-Literate TV Episode Is Up!

    Phil and I are thrilled to announce the release of our pilot e-Literate TV episode.

    Take a look.

    One thing you’ll want to pay attention to is the set of buttons in the upper left-hand corner of the TELLING STORY player:

    Screen Shot 2014-02-12 at 10.59.06 AM

    These buttons correspond to the three modes available to you. From left to right:

    • Watch is a lot like a closed captioned YouTube experience. The focus is on the video.
    • Discover still puts a lot of emphasis on the video, but it also will selectively show related links and graphics. If any of them catch your fancy, you can click on them to take a deeper dive.
    • Explore mode is for when you want the video to be playing in the background but you’re really focusing on the transcript and the supplementary resources (or “transmedia”).

    We’re pretty excited about these capabilities and are eager to hear from you about how they work for you and how you might use them. They look beautiful on tablets, too!

    In terms of content, we’re only launching one episode for now because we want to flight test the technology before we put out the full series, but we expect to publish the rest in about two weeks.

    This one happens to be just Phil and me, but most of these episodes will be conversations with other people. You can get a good sense of what this will feel like from the videos we shot (with our partners IN THE TELLING) at the MOOC Research conference. These will be both released on their own and incorporated into an e-Literate TV series.

    For example, here’s Phil’s interview with Dave Cormier about different kinds of MOOCs and their different uses:

    Here’s my interview with Simon Buckingham Shum about how analytics can help us learn more about student learning, both in MOOCs and in other types of online learning experiences:

    And here’s my interview with Stanford’s Keith Devlin talking about why he is passionate about MOOCs:

    Phil and I will have a lot more to say about ETV in the coming days, and we’re very interested in your feedback. For now, since we’re prompting for a specific feedback question at the end of the episode on the ETV site, please give us your comments on it that aren’t related to the prompt question right here. In the coming days, we intend to add richer and broader discussion capabilities directly to the site.

  • An Employee View of Textbook Publishers and Ed Tech Companies

    Update: For reference, 2U has pointed out to me that they were recently recognized by Glassdoor as the 17th-best medium-sized company to work for in 2014. With an average score of 4.2 (based on 21 reviews), this puts them on top of the other ed tech companies discussed here. The only other education company on the Glassdoor best places lists is Edmentum which, oddly, only has a 3.1 average rating based on 37 reviews.

    Second Update: All the education companies that have scored well on Glassdoor are coming out of the woodwork now. W.W. Norton has pointed out to me that the have a 4.2 average rating, based on 47 reviews. That puts them tied for first among education companies (that I know of) with 2U.

    One way to get a sense of how the companies whose products you depend on are doing is to talk to their employees. This is particularly helpful at times like this, when huge changes are underway. So I thought it would be interesting to take a survey of the employee reviews on Glassdoor of some of the major companies in the industry. The results are revealing, if not entirely surprising.

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