e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • e-Literate TV Update and Request for Help

    We are fast approaching the release of our first e-Literate TV (ETV) series. Our latest estimate is that we will go live in mid-February with a collection of interview episodes filmed at EDUCAUSE 2013 covering the following topics:

    1. An overview of challenges in higher education that are driving conversations about educational technology
    2. A review of the online learning landscape
    3. A discussion MOOC mania
    4. An exploration of the genre of courseware
    5. A conversation about the basics of learning analytics and adaptive learning
    6. A review of one faculty member’s experience with classroom flipping

    Meanwhile, we are already hard at work on the second series, which will be called “Massive and Open: What Are We Learning?” Filmed primarily at the the MOOC Research Initiative Conference, the series takes a deeper dive into how people are actually using the tools that MOOCs offer in different contexts and discusses their promise as well as their problems. We expect this to be the model for future series, where we explore one topic from a number of angles rather than offering a smorgasbord like the pilot series. We have a long list of topics we’d like to cover in future series, ranging from increasing educational access to personalized learning to the promise and perils of big data in education and more.

    With the release of the first series around the corner, Phil and I would like to tell you more about our ideas for ETV and request your feedback and (verbal) support.

    (more…)

  • Gen Ed and Competency-Based Education

    Inside Higher Ed has a write-up today on an effort by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to develop a competency-based framework for general education called General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), funded by a multi-million-dollar Gates Foundation grant. I am honored to report that I have been invited to participate on one of the GEMs committees.

    To be honest, I have mixed feelings about competency-based education (CBE). On the one hand, I do think that an earnest attempt to have a norming conversation and set some standards for what we hope students will learn at college is very important and badly overdue. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to apply CBE in a mechanistic and reductive way that ignores the important but hard-to-measure skills precisely because they’re hard to measure. It’s essentially the same worry that a number of readers expressed in the comments on my post about Pearson’s efficacy initiative. That said, AAC&U has a good shot at assembling the right stakeholders to grapple with this complexity appropriately. I do think there are models out there. For example, ASU’s Habitable Worlds class, which is both competency-based and mastery-based, is not at all dumbed down and could even be further expanded to include writing and similar open-ended analytic and communications skills. (I interviewed Habitable Worlds co-creator Ariel Anbar last year.) But there are many challenges.

    Anyway, the first meeting of the GEMs group is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know what I think after spending a couple of days talking about the issues with the working group.

  • Boundless Is Totally #Winning

    I was contacted by Boundless CEO Ariel Diaz regarding a concern he had with my blog post about the lawsuit outcome. This was not entirely surprising, and I was curious to see which aspects of the post concerned him. Was it my characterization of Boundless as not a content company? Was it my speculation that Boundless was really designed to ride on Chegg’s coattails with the VC community? No, none of those. It was my claim that Boundless lost the legal fight.

    You may wonder, “How can a company that was required to pay $600,000 to the plaintiffs, destroy three of the products it had created, and accept a permanent injunction on how it does business going forward, have actually won?” I wondered that too.

    (more…)

  • Lessons from the Boundless Copyright Infringement Suit

    On December 17th, the Boundless OER-based textbook startup issued a press release describing the settlement they had reached with Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan in the lawsuit those three companies had filed against the company. (Full disclosure: Pearson has been a client of MindWires Consulting.) Actually, a lot of the press release wasn’t really about the lawsuit, and the description of the settlement consisted of the following:

    Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve settled the lawsuit. In agreeing to a confidential settlement agreement, along with a public judgment and injunction entered by the Court, the parties have resolved the dispute. The resolution allows the parties to move forward and focus on their mutually shared goal of helping students learn. Boundless now has a clear path for building and marketing its OER-driven textbook alternatives without treading upon the Plaintiffs’ rights, and it is confident that it is in compliance and will not have further legal issues with the Plaintiff publishers. In turn, Plaintiffs have reinforced the strong protection they have in and to their copyrighted works and the related goodwill that they and their authors have established, and look forward to Boundless operating its business within the agreed upon framework.

    This seemed like a strangely muted ending to a strange story. It’s hard to tell from the press release what actually happened. But having read the consent decree and injunction, I have come to two conclusions. First, Boundless lost. Second, the suit and its outcome tell us very little about the future of OER but rather more about business strategy for ed tech startups.

    (more…)

  • More on Pearson and Change

    I am amazed at the number of comments we have gotten already on the other day’s Pearson post. Don’t you people have better things to do on a holiday than read and comment on 7,000-word blog posts about textbook publishers (asks the man who spent his holiday writing a 7,000-word blog post about a textbook publisher)? Seriously, I am humbled by your commitment. For those of you who subscribe to comments on this blog by email, I’m afraid that is no longer a reliable way to track the conversation. We have integrated Google+ into our blog posts which has the benefit of attracting more commenters and longer conversations at the cost of having two different commenting systems running simultaneously and no good way to track or integrate them. Unfortunately, we are back to the days where you have to go to the page periodically to see what is happening, at least for now.

    Anyway, unsurprisingly, there is a lot of skepticism about Pearson and also the notion of “efficacy” among the commenters. There is also some discussion about the complexity of how we define (or fail to define) the goals education and how the lack of clearly articulated goals makes any attempt to measure efficacy problematic. (Efficacious at what?) This is a point I’ve been trying to make in different ways and for different audiences in several recent posts. Larry Cuban has a timely blog post up on the history of this problem in math education.

    Meanwhile, Carrie Saarinen has a more positive take on the idea of efficacy. I met Carrie at the NERCOMP LMS unConference, when she was working at Brown University. She has since been hired by Instructure (to their great credit). I highly recommend reading Carrie’s post and following her blog.

  • The Year in e-Literacy

    I’m generally conflicted about year-end lists of top blog posts because there is no single way to order the list that is truly reflective of the conversations that we’ve been having together on the blog. But after finding Audrey Watters’ list for Hack Education so interesting I thought, “Oh, what the heck.”

    First, some general stats:

    • We published 148 blog posts in 2013, bringing the total of posts on e-Literate to 1,116.
    • We had about 310,000 visitors during the course of the year
    • The most common search terms that led people to the blog (excluding variations on the blog name) were “moocs”, “lms market size”, and “mcgraw hill education”.
    • We had visitors from 193 countries around the world.

    Here are the top five posts as measured by the number of views:

    1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield (with a whopping 87 comments on it, I might add)
    2. “The Most Thorough Summary To Date of MOOC Completion Rates” in February 2013 by Phil Hill
    3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
    4. “State of the Higher Education LMS Market: A Graphical View” in September 2012 by Phil Hill
    5. “Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A Graphical View” in March 2013 by Phil Hill

    If we look at the number of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” ratings that readers gave to posts, the top five were as follows:

    1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield
    2. “A Taxonomy of Adaptive Analytics Strategies” in March 2013 by Michael Feldstein
    3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
    4. “Cengage MindTap and the Evolution of Courseware” in May 2013 by Michael Feldstein
    5. “Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Improve Teaching” in January 2013 by Michael Feldstein

    And if we look at the number of social media mentions in Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbedUpon, and Pinterest, then the top five are as follows:

    1. “Why the Google Art Project is Important” in May 2013 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
    2. “‘Can I Use This?’ How Museum Image Policies Undermine Education” in November 2012 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
    3. “Google Apps for Education: When Will It Replace the LMS?” in April 2012 by Audrey Watters
    4. “U.S. Claims Global Jurisdiction for .com and .net Web Sites: Is .edu Next?” in January 2012 by Jim Farmer
    5. “Why Higher Education Is In Trouble, In One Graph” in March 2011 by Michael Feldstein

    I would like to provide the top five most commented posts, but since we have integrated Google+ into our post pages a lot of our readers are commenting through that system rather than through WordPress, and I have no way of combining those numbers accurately.

    At any rate, by any measure you choose, Phil and I are thrilled with the year we’ve had. We are humbled by the wonderful featured bloggers who have graced our pages—people like Elijah Mayfield, Mike Caulfield, Bill Jerome, Audrey Watters, Jim Farmer, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker—and deeply grateful for all of you who have taken the time to read, share, think about, and respond to what we have written.

    We look forward to an even better year with you in 2014.

  • Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube?

    Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to dispute that Pearson has an outsized impact on education in America. This huge company—they have a stock market valuation of $18 billion—touches all levels from kindergarten through career education, providing textbooks, homework platforms, high-stakes testing, and even helping to design entire online degree programs. So when they announce a major change in their corporate strategy, it is consequential.

    That is one reason why I think that most everybody who is motivated to read this blog on a regular basis will also find it worthwhile to read Pearson’s startling publication, “The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes” and, more generally, peruse their new efficacy web site. One of our goals for e-Literate is to explain what the industry is doing, why, and what it might mean for education. Finding the answers to these questions is often an exercise in reading the tea leaves, as Phil ably demonstrated in his recent posts on the Udacity/SJSU pilot and the layoffs at Desire2Learn. But this time is different. In all my years of covering the ed tech industry, I have never seen a company be so explicit and detailed about their strategy as Pearson is being now with their efficacy publications. Yes, there is plenty of marketing speak here. But there is also quite a bit about what they are actually doing as a company internally—details about pilots and quality reviews and hiring processes and M&A criteria. These are the gears that make a company go. The changes that Pearson is making in these areas are the best clues we can possibly have as to what the company really means when they say that they want efficacy to be at the core of their business going forward. And they have published this information for all the world to see.

    These now-public details suggest a hugely ambitious change effort within the company. Phil and I have consulted for a few textbook publishers, including Pearson, and I worked for Cengage for a year and a half. We have a pretty good idea of the magnitude of the change management challenges these companies face right now and the strategies that various publishers are bringing to bear in an effort to meet them. I can say with absolute conviction that what Pearson has announced is no half-hearted attempt or PR window dressing, and I can say with equal conviction that what they are attempting will be enormously difficult to pull off. They are not screwing around. Whatever happens going forward, Pearson is likely to be a business school case study for the ages.

    As if all of this drama weren’t enough, Pearson’s strategy raises another question which should be fascinating for educators; namely, can a rubric transform a multi-billion-dollar company?

    Fair warning: This post is ridiculously long. Even by my standards.

    (more…)