e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

    While it is well hidden, wrapped in a very careful press release, Phil’s sharp eye has caught the details in SJSU’s press release about the next phase in the Udacity pilot that suggest the partnership between the school and the company is winding down. When Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed asked an SJSU spokesperson point-blank whether Udacity would continue to be involved with the courses, the reply he got was “Good question for Udacity.”

    Ouch.

    The Schadenfreude surrounding Sebastian Thrun’s fall from grace has been intense ever since the Fast Company article quoted the man who the author labeled the “godfather of free online education” as saying that he realized he had a bad product, and noted that his company is “changing course” to focus on corporate training. Mike Caulfield captured the tone of the reaction in ed tech circles rather nicely when he wrote:

    Thrun can’t build a bucket that doesn’t leak, so he’s going to sell sieves….Udacity dithered for a bit on whether it would be accountable for student outcomes. Failures at San José State put an end to that. The move now is to return to the original idea: high failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs, because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers. Thrun is moving to an area where he is unaccountable, because accountability is hard.

    I imagine that it would be easy for somebody running or funding an ed tech startup to draw the wrong lessons from this sad story. Consider this blog post to be an open letter to my friends at ed tech startups with some advice about how to avoid the kind of disdain and ridicule that Thrun is receiving now.

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  • What Faculty Should Know About Adaptive Learning

    I was honored to be asked by the American Federation of Teachers to write an article on what their membership should know about adaptive learning technologies. That piece is running in this month’s issue of AFT On Campus. I am reprinting it here with their permission.

    The phrase “adaptive learning” is an umbrella term that applies to an incredibly broad range of technologies and techniques with very different educational applications. The common thread is that they all involve software that observes some aspect of student performance and adjusts what it presents to each student based on those observations. In other words, all adaptive software tries to mimic some aspect of what a good teacher does, given that every student has individual needs. (more…)

  • Massive, Open, and Course Design

    Martin Weller has a great blog post up about course design responses to MOOC completion rates. He starts by arguing that, while completion rates are not everything in MOOCs, they are not nothing either. A lot depends on whether you think completion is an important metric to meet the course goals because, for example, the course is designed to help remedial students pass into a non-remedial track, or whether having students explore the content in a non-comprehensive way accomplishes your course goal. (Martin brings up an analogy by Stephen Downes that nobody complains about the low newspaper completion rates, which I have never heard before and which I love.)

    This is good stuff, but it starts us down the path toward a more radical re-examination of how we think about course design. Because while Martin is focusing primarily on course goals and how those should determine metrics, he’s beginning to raise the question of how individual learner goals should influence course design. And once you start asking that question, it changes everything.

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  • Changing the Narrative

    As Phil mentioned, he and I were both lucky to attend the MOOC Research Initiative conference, which was a real tour de force. Jim Groom observed that even the famously curmudgeonly Stephen Downes appeared to be enjoying himself, and I would make a similar observation about the famously curmudgeonly Jonathan Rees. If both of those guys can be simultaneously (relatively) pleased at a MOOC conference, then something is going either spectacularly right or horribly wrong. I believe it was the former in this case.

    We are at one of those rare moments when there’s enough confusion that real conversation happens and possibilities open up. The sense I got is that everybody is really grappling with the questions of where we can take the concept of a “MOOC” and what MOOCishness might be good for. That is fun and hope-inducing. Phil and I spent a lot of the time interviewing folks for a future e-Literate TV series (coming to a computing device near you in March or April of 2014), so we were lucky to hear a lot of perspectives. There is some very good exploration happening now. George Siemens and his fellow conference organizers (as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which sponsored the event and the research) did a real service by bringing people together to talk about these issues at this pregnant moment.

    One thing happened toward the end of the conference that has me puzzled, though. Jim mentioned it in his blog post:

    At the same time[,] Bon Stewart’s admonitions for some kind of organized response to start filling the temporary void of direction with alternative narrative still rings in my ears—and it is very much the lesson I took away from Audrey Watters keynote at OpenEd.

    There was a lot of conversation, really throughout the conference but coming to a head at the end, that the term of MOOC is somehow damaged goods and that…something…should be done about it. Usually the word “narrative” was brought up. But this talk of “alternative narratives” or, as Bonnie put it, “changing the narrative”, confuses me. As far as I’m concerned, the connectivist/open ed crowd has been spectacularly, stunningly successful at “changing the narrative,” and I’m not at all clear what it would look like to somehow do it differently. I don’t understand what they mean here. Unfortunately I had to rush out the door to try to catch a plane shortly after the panel discussion and didn’t have an opportunity to follow up with some of the attendees. So I’m going to try to express my confusion in this blog post and hope that somebody can help me figure out what I’m missing.

    Warning: This post is long and lit crit wonkish.

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  • Announcing the Apereo Foundation Advisory Council

    Long-time readers know that I have had a close affiliation with the Sakai Foundation at teams and served on the Board of Directors relatively recently. This year, Sakai merged with the Jasig Foundation to form the Apereo Foundation. The purpose of the new organization is to become a sort of Apache Foundation of higher education in the sense that it is an umbrella community where members of different open source projects can share best practices and find fellow travelers for higher ed-relevant open source software projects. In this merger, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, last week the foundation just announced that the board of the Opencast project, which supports the Matterhorn lecture capture and video management project, voted to effectively merge with the Apereo Foundation. (The decision is subject to discussion and feedback by the Opencast community.) On the one hand, Opencast probably wouldn’t have joined the Sakai Foundation because they want to interoperate with all LMSs and wouldn’t want to be perceived as favoring one over another. On the other hand, had they joined Jasig prior to the merger, they would not have had access to the rich community of education-focused technologists that Sakai has to offer. (Jasig has historically focused mostly on tech-oriented solutions like portals and identity management solutions). The fact that the Opencast community is interested in joining Apereo is a strong indicator that the new foundation is achieving its goal of establishing an ecumenical brand.

    And in that context, I am pleased to tell you that I will be involved with the foundation in a more ecumenical role. Specifically, I will be facilitating an advisory council.

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  • Purdue University Has an Ethics Problem

    It’s fair to say that Purdue University has sparked several important conversations in ed tech through their work on Course Signals. First, they pretty much put the retention early warning system as a product category on the map, conducting ground-breaking research and building a system that several major ed tech players have either licensed or imitated. More recently, they have sparked a conversation about the state of ed tech research and peer review as their more recent research has been called into question. I highly recommend reading the comment threads on these two posts to get a sense of that conversation.

    Now I think Purdue may spark a third conversation—this time around the ethics of institutional learning analytics research and commercialization. Because there is no question in my mind that they have a serious ethical problem on their hands.

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  • Patent Troll Sues Blackboard for Patent Infringement

    A company called Sampo IP, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of patent troll Marathon Patent Group, is suing Blackboard for patent infringement. The patents in question appear to be incredibly broad and have also been asserted against Salesforce as well as high-profile customers of collaboration companies Jive, Hyperoffice, and Rally, including Dell, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Aetna, and about 15 others. I have not read the patents carefully, but they seem to be related to applying push notifications to allow one person in a group to send notifications or requests to other people in the group.

    Really.

    For those of you tempted to Schadenfreude because of sins of Blackboard’s past, that would be a mistake. Patent trolls like Marathon can come after any company and their customers. In this case, the Marathon patents appear to be broad enough to be important for countless educational applications and could be applied against a range of vendors and schools alike. At the moment, there are no reports of suits against education customers, and there are practical reasons why the patent trolls would be somewhat unlikely to file suit against such customers in the future. But there is no legal barrier. We should all be rooting for Blackboard and the other defendants in this case.

    Patents are a serious and ongoing threat to education. I had hoped during the Blackboard v. D2L fight that there would have been enough concern and awareness within the community to take some broader action, but that never happened. Unfortunately, there are very few tools to employ against patent trolls but what steps can be taken to minimize edupatent suits in general should be taken. Vendors in the space, who own substantial IP, should be encouraged by their customers to form a protective patent pool, for example. Patent pools are of little value against trolls, but at least it would reduce the likelihood of lawsuits by practicing companies. And since big technology players like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle do substantial business in this space, perhaps they could be persuaded to contribute broader patents and create a substantial umbrella of protection. It is even possible the patent pool might yield prior art that could be effective in invalidating patents held by trolls. The sector could also unite to give companies like Marathon a PR black eye whenever they come after educational software. There are steps that could be taken, but educational leadership needs to step up to make it happen.

    You can find and read the legal complaint here.