Yippie i ohhh ohh ohh Yippie i aye ye ye Robot tutors in the sky Before I head out to Indianapolis for the EDUCAUSE conference, I keep thinking back to a comment someone made in response to Michael’s description of Knewton marketing as “selling snake oil”. I can’t find the exact quote, but the gist […]
Why Is Blackboard Laying Off Staff Despite Improved Market Share Position?
Over the past two weeks Blackboard had another round of layoffs, likely due to the company missing financial targets. While one estimate places the number at roughly 200, from what I have heard the number is closer to 90 – 100 people let go. I asked the company for commentary on the layoffs and associated reorganization. By […]
College Scorecard Article Published In Washington Post
I have written several posts looking at the new College Scorecard and its inherent flaws in the data, often starting with observations from Russ Poulin at WCET. Today Susan Svrluga, education reporter at the Washington Post, posted a new article co-written by me and Russ and titled “Hundreds of colleges missing from Obama’s College Scorecard?”. The […]
State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2015 Edition
I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in October 2014, and thanks to revised data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data […]
Response to Robert Talbert: Pedagogical change is difficult, many need support
On Monday Robert Talbert, associate professor at Grand Valley State University and author of the Casting Out Nines blog, wrote a provocative and important post titled “Active learning as an ethical issue”. Robert noted: The recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study stands out among these recent studies. It is a meta-study of 225 prior studies […]
Cracks In The Foundation Of Disruptive Innovation
The overuse of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory has rightly been criticized in education circles for years. I say rightly in that judging a non-commodity public good with the same theory as disk drives is a silly notion without some extensive analysis to back up that extrapolation. As Audrey Watters wrote in 2013: Rather, my assigning […]
Forbes Fantasies: Why Hillsdale College is not in the College Scorecard (hint, boring reasons)
Richard Vedder wrote a particularly uninformed article in Forbes on Friday about the Education Department (ED) not including Hillsdale College in the new College Scorecard. Freed from the burden of facts or research, Vedder let loose the dogs of conspiracy [emphasis in original]. The Obama Administration, with much hype, released its College Scorecard recently, designed to […]