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 […]
Ray Henderson Update
As e-Literate readers know, Ray Henderson is no longer President of Learning Platforms and is now serving on the company’s Board of Directors instead. This sort of thing naturally sets of all sorts of concerns and speculation. I had the good fortune to be able to speak with Ray today and have some details straight from the […]
Blackboard Analytics Update
In my last post, I promised that I would give an update specifically on the state of Blackboard’s learning analytics. Well, here you go. This is a summary of what I learned about their product from a chat with Mark Max, Blackboard’s VP of Learning Analytics and, to a lesser degree, with VP of User […]
Yup, Something (Good) Is Up at Blackboard
When a company the size of Blackboard makes substantial organizational changes, it can be difficult to assess what is really going on. In the beginning, the stories tend to look similar. The old CEO…decides he wants to “spend more time with his family.”1 Well-known long-time employees leave the company en masse, some of their own volition […]
Desire2Learn Analytics Follow-up
A few weeks back, when blogging about Desire2Learn’s new Student Success System retention early warning analytics product, I wrote, From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences […]