e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • Blackboard Brain Drain: One third of executive team leaves in past 3 months

    In August 2013 Michael described Ray Henderson’s departure from an operational role at Blackboard. As of the end of 2014, Ray is no longer on the board of directors at Blackboard either. He is focusing on his board activity (including In The Telling, our partner for e-Literate TV) and helping with other ed tech companies. While Ray’s departure from the board did not come as a surprise to me, I have been noting the surprising number of other high-level departures from Blackboard recently.

    As of December 24, 2014, Blackboard listed 12 company executives in their About > Leadership page. Of those 12 people, 4 have left the company since early January. Below is the list of the leadership team at that time along with notes on changes:

    • Jay Bhatt, CEO
    • Maurice Heiblum, SVP Higher Education, Corporate And Government Markets (DEPARTED February, new job unlisted)
    • Mark Belles, SVP K-12 (DEPARTED March, now President & COO at Teaching Strategies, LLC)
    • David Marr, SVP Transact
    • Matthew Small, SVP & Managing Director, International
    • Gary Lang, SVP Product Development, Support And Cloud Services (DEPARTED January, now VP B2B Technology, Amazon Supply)
    • Katie Blot, SVP Educational Services (now SVP Corporate Strategy & Business Development)
    • Mark Strassman, SVP Industry and Product Management
    • Bill Davis, CFO
    • Michael Bisignano, SVP General Counsel, Secretary (DEPARTED February, now EVP & General Counsel at CA Technologies)
    • Denise Haselhorst, SVP Human Resources
    • Tracey Stout, SVP Marketing

    (more…)

  • Rutgers and ProctorTrack Fiasco: Impact of listening to regulations but not to students

    If you want to observe the unfolding impact of an institution ignoring the impact of policy decisions on students, watch the situation at Rutgers University. If you want to see the power of a single student saying “enough is enough”, go thank Betsy Chao and sign her petition. The current situation is that students are protesting the Rutgers usage of ProctorTrack software – which costs students $32 in additional fees, accessing their personal webcams, automatically tracks face and knuckle video as well as watching browser activity – in online courses. Students seem to be outraged at the lack of concern over student privacy and additional fees.

    Prior to 2015, Rutgers already provided services for online courses to comply with federal regulations to monitor student identity. The rationale cited [emphasis added]:

    The 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) requires institutions with distance education programs to have security mechanisms in place that ensure that the student enrolled in a particular course is in fact the same individual who also participates in course activities, is graded for the course, and receives the academic credit. According to the Department of Education, accrediting agencies must require distance education providers to authenticate students’ identities through secure (Learning Management System) log-ins and passwords, proctored exams, as well as “new identification technologies and practices as they become widely accepted.”

    This academic term, Rutgers added a new option – ProctorTrack: (more…)

  • Slides and Follow-up From Faculty Development Workshop at Aurora University

    Today I facilitated a faculty development workshop at Aurora University, sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the IT Department. I always enjoy sessions like this, particularly with the ability to focus our discussions squarely on technology in support of teaching and learning. The session was titled “Emerging Trends in Educational Technology and Implications for Faculty”. Below are very rough notes, slides, and a follow-up.

    Apparent Dilemma and Challenge

    Building off of previous presentations at ITC Network, there is an apparent dilemma:

    • One one hand, little has changed: Despite all the hype and investment in ed tech, there is only one new fully-established LMS vendor in the past decade (Canvas), and the top uses of LMS are for course management (rosters, content sharing, grades). Plus the MOOC movement fizzled out, at least for replacing higher ed programs or courses.
    • On the other hand, everything has changed: There are examples of redesigned courses such as Habitable Worlds at ASU that are showing dramatic results in the depth of learning by students.

    The best lens to understand this dilemma is Everett Rogers’ Diffusions of Innovations and the technology adoption curve and categories. Geoffrey Moore extended this work to call out a chasm between Innovators / Early Adopters on the left side (wanting advanced tech, OK with partial solutions they cobble together, pushing the boundary) and Majority / Laggards on the right side (wanting full solution – just make it work, make it reliable, make it intuitive). Whereas Moore described Crossing the Chasm for technology companies (moving from one side to the other), in most cases in education we don’t have that choice. The challenge in education is Straddling the Chasm (a concept I’m developing with a couple of consulting clients as well as observations from e-Literate TV case studies): (more…)

  • Brian Whitmer No Longer in Operational Role at Instructure

    Just over a year and a half ago, Devlin Daley left Instructure, the company he co-founded. It turns out that both founders have made changes as Brian Whitmer, the other company co-founder, left his operational role in 2014 but is still on the board of directors. For some context from the 2013 post:

    Instructure was founded in 2008 by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley. At the time Brian and Devlin were graduate students at BYU who had just taken a class taught by Josh Coates, where their assignment was to come up with a product and business model to address a specific challenge. Brian and Devlin chose the LMS market based on the poor designs and older architectures dominating the market. This design led to the founding of Instructure, with Josh eventually providing seed funding and becoming CEO by 2010.

    Brian had a lead role until last year for Instructure’s usability design and for it’s open architecture and support for LTI standards.

    The reason for Brian’s departure (based on both Brian’s comments and comments from Instructure statements) is based on his family. Brian’s daughter has Rett Syndrome: (more…)

  • Dana Center and New Mathways Project: Taking curriculum innovations to scale

    Last week the University of Texas’ Dana Center announced a new initiative to digitize their print-based math curriculum and expand to all 50 community colleges in Texas. The New Mathways Project is ‘built around three mathematics pathways and a supporting student success course’, and they have already developed curriculum in print:

    Tinkering with the traditional sequence of math courses has long been a controversial idea in academic circles, with proponents of algebra saying it teaches valuable reasoning skills. But many two-year college students are adults seeking a credential that will improve their job prospects. “The idea that they should be broadly prepared isn’t as compelling as organizing programs that help them get a first [better-paying] job, with an eye on their second and third,” says Uri Treisman, executive director of the Charles A. Dana Center at UT Austin, which spearheads the New Mathways Project. [snip]

    Treisman’s team has worked with community-college faculty to create three alternatives to the traditional math sequence. The first two pathways, which are meant for humanities majors, lead to a college-level class in statistics or quantitative reasoning. The third, which is still in development, will be meant for science, technology, engineering, and math majors, and will focus more on algebra. All three pathways are meant for students who would typically place into elementary algebra, just one level below intermediate algebra.

    When starting, the original problem was viewed as ‘fixing developmental math’. As they got into the design, the team restated the problem to be solved as ‘developing coherent pathways through gateway courses into modern degrees of study that lead to economic mobility’. The Dana Center worked with the Texas Association of Community Colleges to develop the curriculum, which is focused on active learning and group work that can be tied to the real world. (more…)

  • Alternate Ledes for CUNY Study on Raising Graduation Rates

    Last week MDRC released a study on the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) with near breathless terms.

    Title page

    • ASAP was well implemented. The program provided students with a wide array of services over a three-year period, and effectively communicated requirements and other messages.
    • ASAP substantially improved students’ academic outcomes over three years, almost doubling graduation rates. ASAP increased enrollment in college and had especially large effects during the winter and summer intersessions. On average, program group students earned 48 credits in three years, 9 credits more than did control group students. By the end of the study period, 40 percent of the program group had received a degree, compared with 22 percent of the control group. At that point, 25 percent of the program group was enrolled in a four-year school, compared with 17 percent of the control group.
    • At the three-year point, the cost per degree was lower in ASAP than in the control condition. Because the program generated so many more graduates than the usual college services, the cost per degree was lower despite the substantial investment required to operate the program.

    Accordingly the media followed suit with breathless coverage ((And this article comes from a reporter for whom I have tremendous respect.)). Consider this from Inside Higher Ed and their article titled “Living Up to the Hype”: (more…)

  • Editorial Policy: Notes on recent reviews of CBE learning platforms

    Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
    I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
    To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen
    They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed

    – R Plant, Kashmir

    Over the past half year or so I’ve provided more in-depth product reviews of several learning platforms than is typical – Helix, FlatWorld, LoudCloud, Bridge. Understanding that at e-Literate we are not a review site nor do we tend to analyze technology for technology’s sake, it’s worth asking ‘why the change?’. There has been a lot of worthwhile discussion in several blogs recently about whether the LMS is obsolete or critical to the future of higher ed, and this discussion even raised the subject of how we got to the current situation in the first place.

    An interesting development I’ve observed is that the learning environment of the future might already be emerging on its own, but not necessarily coming from the institution-wide LMS market. Canvas, for all its market-changing power, is almost a half decade old. The area of competency-based education (CBE), with its hundreds of pilot programs, appears to be generating a new generation of learning platforms that are designed around the learner (rather than the course) and around learning (or at least the proxy of competency frameworks). It seems useful to get a more direct look at these platforms to understand the future of the market and to understand that the next generation environment is not necessarily a concept yet to be designed.

    (more…)