When Pearson’s OpenClass was announced about a year and a half ago, the natural question to ask was whether it would disrupt the LMS market. But that was then and this is now. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) The more interesting question today is where OpenClass stands vis-à-vis the MOOCs. To begin […]
Apollo Group’s Technology Investments
I had an unexpected opportunity to chat with the Apollo Group’s Rob Wrubel last week. Rob is their Chief Innovation Officers and Executive Vice President. It was a short conversation—only fifteen minutes—but boy, was it dense with information.
Kevin Carey Gives the Right Diagnosis; I’m Less Sure About the Prescription
In piece for the New Republic that I missed when it came out, Kevin Carey provides a compelling diagnosis of the cost problem in higher education that’s worth quoting at length: [H]ighly-profitable lower division courses in common subjects like Economics, Calculus, and Psychology have similar curricula at most colleges and rely on many of the same […]
Beyond the MOOC Hype: Getting Serious about Online Learning
Phil and I will be giving a webinar with the same title as this blog post for EDUCAUSE ELI on Monday, February 11th at 1 PM ET. It’s aimed at folks on campuses, especially Presidents, Provosts, and other academic decision-makers, who weren’t necessarily focused on online learning in the way that they are now that […]
Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching
Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me: The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say […]
Data Envy
While we have occasionally written about college costs and budgets here at e-Literate, it mostly hasn’t been part of our brief as a site that focuses on technology-mediated education. That is changing, in large part because cost and budgets are increasingly becoming the drivers for change, in California and elsewhere. But I’ve been astonished at how […]
Smart
Governor Brown appears to be focusing his attention on “bottleneck courses”: As part of the additional $125.1 million in proposed state funds, $10 million has been directed in the Governor’s budget for online strategies to get more students through so-called “bottleneck” courses. These are courses across the system that cause many students to slow their […]