e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • 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 from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)…

    I’m going to try to talk to some D2L clients who are actually using this product next week when Phil and I are at D2L FUSION.

    And then the other day, describing my overall impressions of the FUSION conference, I wrote,

    Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers….On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on….

    [T]he point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.

    It turns out that analytics is a perfect example the overall problems I described in the latter post: good product vision, serious technical implementation problems that have been understated and probably underestimated, and relatively new technical managers that seem to have some hope of getting the issues straightened out.

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  • 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 systems. Massive and adaptive and big data could help solve those problems to the degree that the people behind them would pay close attention to what humans already know. But more often than not, they are not paying attention. Or they have picked up on some little sliver, such as the role of repetition in long-term memory formation, and built a whole product around it. In general, educational experts are brought in as occasional consultants and best, and ignored altogether at worst.

    That is why I find this critique of Sal Khan’s videos by Christopher Danielson, a math and math education teacher at a community college, so refreshing and important. This is not snarky, “Mystery  Teacher Theatre 2000” stuff. Nor is it a hysterical rant on why computers could NEVER replace teachers. Rather, it is a careful, research-backed analysis of what’s wrong with one aspect of Sal Khan’s math videos, with the explicit goal of helping Khan to improve the value of his work. This is incredibly good stuff. And as a bonus, Danielson demonstrates just how easy it is to use a social network like Twitter to get help from a community of educators.

    We really need to figure out how to get better at inviting this kind of dialogue. We shouldn’t just rely on the Christopher Danielsons of the world to beat on the doors of the great tech temples until somebody can be bothered to answer.

  • 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 working hard to demystify the tools.

  • 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, but they’ve gone significantly further with it than the other LMS companies have so far.) It was a useful complement to the information that we get from walking the floor and talking to customers. And, as I’m sure they intended, we walked away from the experience feeling somewhat more positive about the company than we did going in—not so much because of the dog-and-pony show but because we were able to ask some hard questions to senior managers and, more often than not, get reasonable answers.

    Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers. These factors contribute significantly to their very high customer retention rate, even relative to the other LMS providers which, as a group, generally have fairly high retention rates. On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on. CEO John Baker, whose deeply ingrained sense of optimism enabled him to face down a patent lawsuit against serious odds, can be the worst offender in this regard. He is chronically overly optimistic about the state of the company’s products and the seriousness of any bumps in the road.

    In the last year or two, D2L has begun hiring some outsiders to bolster their technical team. They have benefitted from the hot tech market in Kitchener in general and to the collapse of RIM in particular, snapping up relatively senior Blackberry technical people. But it’s fair to say that they have been actively recruiting tech talent, both inside and outside of Kitchener, for a while now. For example, they hired Al Essa, whom I have known for over a decade since his time as CEO of MIT’s Sloan School of Business and his leadership in the dotLRN open source LMS community, to head up their analytics product line.

    It’s hard to tell for certain whether this hiring trend has accelerated since D2L received their investment, but it certainly appears like that might be the case. I’ll call out the example of Nick Oddson, the new VP of Enterprise Product Engineering, who came from OpenText (a serious enterprise content management company that you probably have never heard of). Nick impressed both Phil and me as a guy who knows his stuff and is a straight shooter about what the company is doing well and what it is not doing well yet. At some point we expect to write more about what Nick in particular is up to, because we think it’s pretty pivotal for the future of the company. For now, the point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.

    I’ll have a follow-up post specifically on their analytics products fairly soon.

  • No, really, courseware is a thing now

    In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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  • BREAKING: Blackboard Uses “MOOC” in a Sentence

    This week we heard the news that Blackboard…um…they are…well…something about MOOCs. They like them, I think. Or something.

    Look, I get it. The company has realized that they need to take more direct action in response to the MOOC trend and, while they are not yet in position to make a specific product announcements, they want to let their customers know of their intention to do so. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s please all get with the fact that the real story at the moment is Blackboard’s recognition that they need to have a MOOC strategy and not anything that they have…you know…actually done. At least, not anything that they have shown us yet. As far as I can tell, what Blackboard has announced is that they have an announcement. A newsworthy announcement for sure, but still just words. There is nothing MOOCish they have shown us this week that we haven’t already seen. It is hard to tell that from a casual read of most of the coverage.

    This is more a criticism of the ed tech press and blogosphere than it is of Blackboard. Transparency is good. I like it when a company’s executives tell us what they are thinking about and planning. There also was some substance to the announcement at a business level. We now know that Blackboard’s MOOC platform will be free and that it will not be CourseSites. That is new information. Sure, they could have been a little less hype-y about it—their press release does read like a product announcement—but really, they are well within bounds of normal corporate PR puffery. If we can’t read between the lines correctly, then shame on us.

    As Phil has pointed out, the collision course between MOOC providers and LMS providers is becoming a clear and significant trend, and Blackboard’s announcement is one data point confirming that trend. But at this point I have no idea what they think it means for them to play in the MOOC space, how serious they are about it, or whether their product entry will be interesting. We will have to wait and see what they do.

  • The Flip and the Rise of Courseware

    My new favorite edublogger (not counting my dear friends here on e-Literate, to whom I am partial) is Mike Caufield over at Hapgood. I don’t know how I missed him up until now, but I was very lucky to meet him at a recent Lumen Learning event. I learn something valuable from just about every post of his that I read.

    Case in point: His post on the distributed flip based on a talk he gave at InstructureCon. (Sadly, I have missed most of the LMS conferences this year due to other business travel.) This is a nuanced and interesting piece that is worth reading in its entirety.

    That said, there is one idea I’d like to highlight that is related to something that Phil and I have written about quite a bit. It all starts with the notion of the “cognitive cutoff” as the motivation for the flipped classroom. At it’s heart, it’s a simple idea. If you want your students to learn a sophisticated concept, they have to learn the simpler concepts that form the foundation first. One way to think about flipping is that the students are getting the foundation at home so that you can guide them through the sophisticated stuff in class. The line between the “at-home” stuff and the “in class” stuff is the cognitive cutoff. It’s the line between the stuff you think they can handle on their own and the stuff you think they’re really going to need your help with.

    But here’s where Mike takes the idea someplace fascinating:

    What I find interesting about the cognitive cutoff from an educational materials perspective is this. If your cognitive cutoff is low – somewhere just over remembering – your educational materials issue is pretty simple, and you might be able to deal with it by recording some mini-lectures and combining them with textbook readings. In this sort of scenario it’s completely possible that a faculty member could do this by themselves, though admittedly at an increased workload.

    But what if you want to push that cognitive cutoff to where [Robert] Talbert is pushing it? And what if you want to develop a rich set of activities and materials that support the students in reaching that cutoff before class?

    I’d propose that to do that in a really effective way requires more work than any one single faculty member can do, and that when you get into designing online components that test application, understanding, and analysis that you may also be pulling from skills that are not traditionally those of faculty (e.g. instructional design). You have to get beyond the cottage industry model of course design.

    If the residential college, or its digital…er…analog of traditional faculty-led distance learning, is going to be able to continue to justify its existence in the face of alternative methods that will increasingly provide lower cost structures, it has to have a set of pedagogical approaches that can deliver very high learning impact on a reliable basis. Mike’s suggestion of keeping the cognitive cutoff high is one reasonable strategy for achieving that impact. But taking that strategy will entail faculty accepting a new relationship to their course designs. It means they have to rely increasingly on research done by cross-functional teams across many class cohorts for the course and curricular materials designs, and invest their personal sense of self-worth instead on what they accomplish in the classroom as an advanced coach. Unfortunately, some faculty seem to equate this sort of change with them becoming “glorified TAs”—an idea frequently expressed with an air of disdain.