Back in June I had the pleasure of giving the keynote at the Online Teaching Conference (#CCCOTC15) in San Diego, put on by the California Community College system. There was quite a bit of valuable backchannel discussions as well as sharing of the slides. The theme of the talk was: Emerging Trends in Online / […]
Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes
George Siemens made an excellent point in his recent blog post after his White House meeting. I’m getting exceptionally irritated with the narrative of higher education is broken and universities haven’t changed. This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the “disrupt and transform” learning crowd. Universities are exceptional at innovating […]
IBM’s Misleading or Just Incorrect National Ad on Student Retention
Thanks to Chris Edwards for alerting me to this one. In a nutshell, IBM launched a national ad campaign last month that included commercials during Wimbledon on the weekend. They’re spending big money on this campaign about big data, learning analytics, and reducing “dropout rates” [emphasis added below]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiv4X1K7iX4 In the US, 3 in 10 […]
Blackboard Potential Sale: Market timing, financials, and some thoughts on potential buyers
With Reuters’ story last week that Blackboard is putting itself up for sale through an auction, one question to ask is ‘why now?’. As Michael has pointed out, Blackboard is in the midst of a significant, but incomplete and late, re-architecture of its product line. Bottom line: If you think that Ultra is all about […]
Using TAs As Key Component Of Active Learning Transformation at UC Davis
Last week I described how UC Davis is making efforts to personalize one of the most impersonal of learning experiences – large lecture introductory science courses. It is telling that the first changes that they made were not to the lecture itself but to the associated discussion sections led by teaching assistants (TAs). It is […]
Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction
As I was writing a post about Blackboard’s key challenges, I get notice from Reuters (anonymous sources, so interpret accordingly) that the company is on the market, seeking up to $3 billion. From Reuters: Blackboard Inc, a U.S. software company that provides learning tools for high school and university classrooms, is exploring a sale that […]
UC Davis: A look inside attempts to make large lecture classes active and personal
In my recent keynote for the Online Teaching Conference, the core argument was as follows: While there will be (significant) unbundling around the edges, the bigger potential impact [of ed innovation] is how existing colleges and universities allow technology-enabled change to enter the mainstream of the academic mission. Let’s look at one example. Back in […]