This week is the week of the big annual EDUCAUSE conference which, among other things, is the world’s largest ed tech fashion show. In the next five days, we will learn that earth tones are the latest style for adaptive personalized learning systems, and that hemlines and license fees are both going way up […]
The IMS’s New “Caliper” Learning Analytics Interoperability Framework Is Deeply Interesting
The IMS has announced the initial public release of something they call Caliper, which they characterize as a learning analytics interoperability framework. But it’s actually much, much more than that. In fact, it represents the functional core of something that my SUNY colleagues and I used to refer to as a Learning Management Operating System […]
e-Literate and Conflicts of Interest
As you may know, Phil and I started a consulting practice in January. Throughout my years of blogging here, I have made it a practice to update readers on how changes in professional life may affect the writing that I (and now we) do on the blog. I don’t believe there is any such thing […]
Digging into the Purdue Course Signals Results
Update: Mike has written another post clarifying the intuitions behind his math. The spectacular Mike Caulfield casts a skeptical eye on the Course Signals data: Only a portion of Purdue’s classes are Course Signals classes, so the chance any course a freshman takes is a Course Signals course can be expressed as a percentage, say 25%. […]
More Blogging on Automated Essay Grading
Sometime guest blogger and friend of e-Literate Elijah Mayfield has another great post up on using machine learning tools in the service of improving student writing over at his company blog. However you may feel about the technology, the exploration that he’s doing raises some important question about what good feedback on writing is. This aspect of […]
Effort and Engagement
I’ve been thinking a little more this morning about the language used by the researchers in the SJSU Udacity report. They focus a lot on student “effort.” But it’s also pretty common in education to talk about “engagement.” From a technical perspective, the researchers chose the better word. “Effort” is meant to be an observable […]
What Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Udacity Should Learn from SJSU
As Phil noted in his analysisof the SJSU report, one of the main messages of the report seems to be that some of what we already know about performance and critical success factors for more traditional online courses also seem to apply to xMOOCs. But how good is the ed tech industry at taking advantage […]