e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • Combining MOOC Student Patterns Graphic with Stanford Analysis

    In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared a description of five student patterns emerging from open-enrollment MOOCs (excluding those with an associated student fee) based on anecdotal data.  In part 4 I compared the overall course completion pattern against an MIT study of the first edX MOOC, leading to some validation of the general shape of when participants drop out.

    Combined MOOC patterns

    The model and typology has gained traction recently, being referenced in both the Government of Ontario’s  environmental scan and literature review [pp 32-33, 40] as well as the British government’s The Maturing of the MOOC literature review [pp 26-28]. So that means it’s time to update and keep people on their toes.

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  • Lack of online course evaluation leads to accreditation warning

    ACCJC, the accrediting commission behind the City College of San Francisco crisis, issued an warning to Honolulu Community College in February of this year, with a report required by October 15. As described in Hawai’i News Now:

    Honolulu Community College has been placed on warning accreditation status by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, the only of the University of Hawaii’s ten campuses to get such a warning.

    The accrediting panel gave the 4,400-student campus the warning after an evaluation visit to the Kalihi school last fall.

    What is interesting in this action is that one of the primary drivers of the warning was HCC’s lack of evaluation of the effectiveness of their online courses versus the comparable face-to-face courses.

    More than 100 HCC faculty members teach courses online and that’s where the accreditation panel leveled its most serious criticism.

    “The college should compare the instructional quality of face-to-face and distance education courses and develop a strategic plan for distance education,” the accrediting panel wrote.

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  • Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week

    In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of  edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses online through Coursera.

    First the MIT news from Inside Higher Ed (see the Chronicle for additional coverage):

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will this fall package some of its online courses into more cohesive sequences, just as edX prepares to roll out certificates of completion using identity verification. Seen together, the two announcements may provide a glimpse at what the future holds for the massive open online course provider.

    The “XSeries” sequences add a new layer of structure to MITx, the institution’s section of the edX platform. The first of seven courses in the Foundations of Computer Science XSeries will be offered this fall, with one or more new courses being rolled out each semester until the fall of 2015. The Supply Chain Management XSeries, consisting of three courses, will begin in the fall of 2014. The two sequences will target undergraduates and working professionals, respectively. [snip]

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  • Layoffs and reorganization at Blackboard

    Bill Flook, who covers the DC technology scene for Business Journals, just interviewed Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt about last week’s layoff. The full article can be found here. From a quick read, it looks like Blackboard is executing on two key priorities:

    • Trimming the fat caused by years of acquisitions and redundant operations; and
    • Completing the acquisitions by centralizing core functions, particularly under new management.

    From the article:

    Blackboard Inc. carried out a round of layoffs last week as part of a broader reorganization by CEO Jay Bhatt, the latest in a string of actions aimed at revitalizing the 16-year-old ed-tech behemoth.

    Bhatt, in an interview Tuesday evening, confirmed the job cuts, which he described as “a very small action we took to take some costs out of the business, primarily on things that don’t allow us to get where we need to go.” He declined to specify the number of layoffs.

    As for the priority of trimming the fat, it is now fairly clear that Blackboard is not set to divest any major product lines, but rather will follow a path of centralization. The new management team is a key part of the reorganization plans.

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  • MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?

    Robert McGuire wrote an article for Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, that touches on an important topic – is the centralized discussion forum a barrier to student engagement?

    But more students can also mean more isolation within the crowd. “Online classes can be really lonely places for students if they don’t feel like there’s a community,” notes Maria Andersen, director of learning and research at Instructure, which runs Canvas Network, an open repository where participating schools can deliver their own MOOCs.

    Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them. Discussion forums are the number one complaint by readers and contributors of MOOC News and Reviews, an online publication devoted to critiquing individual MOOC courses and the evolving MOOC landscape. Most MOOC discussion forums have dozens of indistinguishable threads and offer no way to link between related topics or to other discussions outside the platform. Often, they can’t easily be sorted by topic, keyword, or author. As a result, conversations have little chance of picking up steam, and community is more often stifled than encouraged.

    There are several studies that appear to show that MOOC discussion forums have few students participating and that the forums are dominated by a small number of students.

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  • SJSU research report confirms MOOCs are online courses

    By reading the SJSU research report (download actual report here), one item that really hits me is that however different the scaling model is for MOOCs, they are still online courses and have similar success factors. I am not trying to minimize the value of the report by the title of this post, because there is real value in letting objective data lead you to conclusions, even if hunches and assumptions would have led to similar results.

    First, however, it would be useful to understand the data and key terms – AOLE is Augmented Online Learning Environment, which represents the additional support structures and for-credit status for MOOCs.

    Out of a total of 274 students enrolled in AOLE courses, 249 students remained in the sample after data cleaning, which included removal of students enrolled in multiple courses and of those with no course activity. In addition, 36 students were removed who withdrew from the course or received a final grade of Incomplete. This left 213 students for the deeper analysis. This data set will be referenced throughout this report as a “research data file”.

    So this data does not include no-shows, withdraws or incompletes, making it more akin to analyzing a traditional college course after the add / drop period.

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  • SJSU releases NSF-funded research report on Udacity pilot

    Back in late July we found out that San Jose State University was pausing their SJSU Plus pilot program using Udacity for-credit MOOCs due to low passing rates. While there was fairly extensive media coverage of the story broken by Inside Higher Ed, there was the promise of a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research report based on the spring 2013 courses. I described why the research report was important, despite indications that the lessons learned aligned with well-known practices for online education.

    With this many known issues, which have also been documented in several excellent blog posts, why is it valuable for SJSU to use the external NSF-funded report?

    In my opinion, there will still be value in A) releasing the full data set and analysis, and B) getting others to understand key points.

    Many specialists might understand why the program failed, but many others do not. Campus leaders and policy makers need to learn many of the lessons that are already known in ed tech / higher ed community, and SJSU Plus will help in this area. Plus, I wouldn’t discount some unexpected findings (e.g. need for self-pacing in math courses as mentioned in student surveys). [snip]

    It is important for some of the new participants (and I would add foundations, state governments, university presidents, etc) to fully understand what worked and what didn’t work in this application of online education. The official report from SJSU will provide a valuable service to help with this learning process.

    There is also value in this very public case establishing a precedent of pausing pilots that don’t work, evaluating results early in the process, adjusting the course and support design based on findings, and focusing on student learning outcomes as the primary measure of success.

    After several delays, SJSU has now released the full NSF-funded research report on Elaine Collins’ official web page (she was the principal investigator). The full report can be downloaded here.

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