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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Comments from a Researcher on the Course Signals Kerfluffle
Doug Clow of the Open University has published a thoughtful and detailed blog post in response to the Course Signals effectiveness controversy. He covers far too much ground for me to attempt to summarize here, but I think there are some common themes emerging from the commentary so far: The concerns over the one study have […]