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 […]
Hello? Pedagogy?
With all the hype about massive and adaptive and big data, it’s hard to remember sometimes that real flesh and blood humans do know some things about teaching and learning. In fact, we know a lot about it in some areas. We’re just not very good at disseminating and deploying it effectively across our educational […]
Great Post on Machine Learning and Essay Grading
Vik Paruchuri, the author of the edX automated essay grading component, has a great (and lengthy) post up that, in part, responds to Elijah Mayfield’s post on the edX announcement. There’s a good discussion going on in comments, too. We need more posts like this one. I’m happy to see the experts in this field […]
Desire 2 Improve
Phil and I spent some time at Desire2Learn’s FUSION conference the other week, and it was an interesting experience. D2L had a couple of first-ever “analyst days” in which we and a few others got some intensive briefings on their products and strategies. (D2L isn’t the only company that is doing this sort of thing, […]