e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state of California $39 million due to an audit of distance education courses.

    City College of San Francisco, struggling for every dollar it can muster, must repay the state nearly $39 million because it can’t prove that instructors taught thousands of students in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014, an audit revealed.

    City College has been unable to verify teaching about 16,000 students in 587 online courses — from Accent Improvement to Cardiorespiratory Emergencies — over the three-year period, according to the state-commissioned audit that ended in September.

    It took a little bit of digging during a conference call (shh, don’t tell the hosts), but it looks like the issue was that the vast majority of faculty teaching online or hybrid courses chose to not use the centralized Moodle LMS system despite district policy that the LMS is the official record of student and faculty interaction.  (more…)

  • UT Austin and SMOCs: What do we know about whether they work?

    In episode 1, we looked at an effort by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin to develop SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous online experience for large lecture courses (1000+ students in some cases) courses. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) In episode 2, we took a deeper look at how SMOCs work as well as a discussion of high-level course design costs. In this concluding episode, we ask the question of whether SMOCs work, in terms of improved learning outcomes and / or learning experiences.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/yoIppZ97Ko4)

     

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  • UT Austin and SMOCs: What these synchronous courses look like and cost

    Last month we shared a video describing how the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin is taking a different approach than some of the courseware-based or other course redesign efforts. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) In many of these other redesigns, there is an emphasis on the asynchronous elements of lab section and lecture preparation and even fully flipping the classroom (no lectures in class on the course content). In contrast, the UT Austin approach to improving the large lecture course centers on SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous course lecture. Watch episode 1 to get a better feel of what problem they are trying to solve and how this SMOC approach appears to keep faculty in their traditional role, albeit with additional preparation time and video production.

    In this episode, we’re taking a deeper look at how SMOCs work as well as high-level course design costs.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/MAHm_JU6upU)

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  • New Release of European LMS Market Report

    New Release of European LMS Market Report

    Our Spring 2016 LMS Market Report from our new LMS subscription service focused mostly on the United States and Canada. The LMS market, however is increasingly global in nature. LMS suppliers rely on markets outside of US and Canada for growth, and Moodle in particular has a long history of global adoption. Maintaining a US/Canadian view without additional data can be misleading when forecasting the roadmaps and future states of various LMS solutions.

    What we haven’t had until now is a view of the LMS market in Europe. Thanks to our partnership with LISTedTECH, we can now share data from more than 1,600 higher education institutions throughout Europe and provide the first independent market analysis for this region. While this report and future analysis is part of the LMS subscription service, we are sharing the initial version freely with a CC-BY license. (more…)

  • The Remarkable Transformation at UF Online

    The University of Florida, based on a plan created by the state legislature, started UF Online in 2013. The original business plan was a case study in optimistic enrollment planning and the road-to-riches through online education. From program inception, UF Online was forecast to grow to a headcount of 24,000 students within 10 years, 43% of whom would be out-of-state high-tuition students, generating $76 million in annual revenue and $14 million of “profit”. Then reality hit. The first executive director quit, enrollment reality did not match plans, they got rid of their Online Program Management partner (Pearson), and they hired a new executive director with no higher education management experience. In my May 2015 coverage, I concluded:

    UF Online seems to be institutionally-focused rather than student-focused, and the initiative is shaping up to be a case study in hubris. Without major changes in how the program is managed, including the main campus input into decisions, UF Online risks becoming the new poster child of online education failures. I honestly hope they succeed, but the current outlook is not encouraging.

    In a remarkable transformation in the past year originally described at Inside Higher Ed, UF Online appears to have made “major changes to how the program is managed” and is now focusing on students and reality. (more…)

  • UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses

    Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie Mellon University. More specifically, the lecture was redesigned to bring students “out of the back row”, and the lab sections were flipped using OLI. Many efforts to personalize learning experiences end up increasing the amount of asynchronous pre-classroom time spent with courseware of some sort.

    At the University of Texas at Austin, the College of Liberal Arts is taking a different approach and focusing on the synchronous class time. The core of the course redesigns since 2013 centers on live lecture sessions created in a studio setting, with a small audience of students, streaming live to very large classes that can exceed 1,000 students each. They have named the approach Synchronous Massive Online Courses, or SMOCs. To get a sense of the problem UT Austin is trying to solve and why they have chosen the SMOC approach, watch this episode.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/WOFxl09KZhE)

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  • University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes

    After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar and Sunthar Premakumar. After that meeting, Piazza provided a statement that we published in “Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy”. The statement primarily dealt with a mea culpa from Piazza about working directly with institutions to form agreements around privacy policies and terms of use, including this section:

    We are committed to fixing this. In fact we already have started. We have entered into agreements with Georgia Tech and Brown, and have ongoing engagement with Stanford, UBC and UC Davis[1]. In our conversations universities have been very happy with our policies, practice, and compliance. We are fully committed to entering into contracts with universities that protect students, professors, and the institutions including FERPA, accessibility, and more.

    I have subsequently had conversations with staff from several of the schools mentioned above to verify the information. Some of the responses were good (as in positive review for Piazza and their willingness to work with the school), some were bad, and in parallel I noticed several web site changes that appear to be related to this reporting and follow-up. (more…)