e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • A Quarter of Indiana’s Community College Facilities Could Face Closure

    Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana started in 1963 as a vocational technical school in Indiana (the name derives from I. V. Tech), and in 1999 the school became a comprehensive community college as described at Inside Higher Ed in 2008.

    Ivy Tech (at one time known as Indiana Vocational Technical College) had long focused on vocational and technical education, and it joined with Vincennes University in 1999 in an effort to build a system of two-year colleges that would focus on general education and transfer as well as technical training. That partnership largely fell apart in 2004, though, and Ivy Tech became the sole sponsor of the community college effort.

    The state of Indiana had lacked a community college system, and regional campuses that were part of Purdue University or Indiana University offered many two-year associates degrees. Despite an effort from state officials to move two-year degrees to community colleges, the four-year colleges resisted this effort.

    And by and large, the transition did not occur. Despite the (vague) language in the proclamation [from 2001], part of a broader “Campus Compact” in which the Indiana Commission on Higher Education sought to improve coordination among state colleges, relatively little changed. The declaration said that four-year institutions could continue to offer a small number of degrees that were consistent with their missions, and Indiana’s regional four-year campuses clung ferociously to associate degrees that brought them students and the associated tuition revenue that came with them.

    Finally, in 2008 the vast majority of associate’s degrees for the state of Indiana were shifted to Ivy Tech, which was on a path to expansion. Paul Fain concluded:

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  • California’s Online Education Bill SB 520 Passes Senate

    Last week senate bill 520 (SB 520) unanimously passed the California senate, and it is now heading to the assembly for review and, if passed, on to the governor for signature. I have covered the basics of SB520, shared the text of the bill, and described the first round of amendments to the bill. Michael and I have both provided commentary of the bill, and we have also written a position paper for The 20 Million Minds Foundation on the general topic of online education in California.

    Now that the bill has passed its major test in the senate, it would be worth comparing the current bill with that proposed a few months ago, as the amendments have been significant. The majority of amendments have been in response to faculty concerns about governance and quality assurance of online courses. The full text of the current bill can be found here.

    Highlight of Changes

    Original proposal of SB520 would have:

    • Created the California Online Student Access Platform to be administered by the California Open Education Resources Council (the one created to administer California’s OER law SB1052);
    • Created a single pool of online versions of “the 50 most impacted lower division courses” across all three systems (University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges);
    • Required the three systems to provide credit to students who successful take and pass the courses; and
    • Included content that has been reviewed and recommended by the American Council on Education.

    Current version of SB 520 that passed senate would:

    • Create a set of three Incentive Grant programs for online courses to be administered by the office of President or Chancellor for each system “in consultation with their respective statewide academic senates”;
    • (more…)

  • LMS Market Update: May and June News

    There have been a number of LMS and Learning Platform announcements over the past month or two that will help shape the market over the next year or more. One trend I’ve described is the transition from an LMS market to a Learning Platform market, which includes a broader scope of products. Below are some of the notable announcements. I expect that Michael and I will write separate posts in more detail on several of these updates.

    • LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact
    • Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M
    • Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release
    • Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE
    • Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market
    • edX finishes releasing platform code as open source
    • LMS conference season approaching

    LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact

    In mid May, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik hosted a panel discussion of the LMS CEOs at the Learning Impact conference. Blackboard’s new CEO, Jay Bhatt, was welcomed into the higher education community with the, ahem, liveliest panel discussion in recent memory. Given the all-star panel (John Baker, CEO, Desire2Learn; Jay Bhatt, CEO, Blackboard; Josh Coates, CEO Instructure; Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle; Manoj Kutty, CEO, LoudCloud Systems; Matt Leavy, CEO, Pearson eCollege), I’ve been surprised to see very little discussion after the event.

    But then I remembered:

    The First Rule of the LMS Panel is you do not talk about the LMS Panel

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  • MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article:

     Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC users, the company realized that most of them had already earned college degrees, said Ms. Koller. That was well and good, but it suggested to Coursera’s founders that MOOCs would not be sufficient to achieve their ambitions.

    “If you’re looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you’re going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with,” Ms. Koller said.

    and from the New York Times:

    “Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

    These statements can be understood by looking at the demographic data for students that have been taking xMOOCs (i.e. from Coursera, Udacity and edX) in their first year.

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  • The Right to Educational Access Paper, Part IV

    Update: This paper can be found at the 20MM site and has also been broken into four separate posts on e-Literate:

    Recommendations

    The scope of this position paper is an analysis and set of recommendations on the “application of state-driven online education initiatives to address the bottleneck course problem at the three public systems in California”. In particular, we should address the question of of how the state could most effectively invest the proposed $37 million in funding, above and beyond the increased general funding to the three systems.

    The key aspect for increased online education is to create and support a new right – for matriculated students to have access to the courses they need to complete their degrees.

    Towards achieving that goal, we recommend the following:

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  • MOOC as Courseware: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed:

    Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses.

    Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players.

    The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera’s online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

    One key aspect of this announcement is Coursera’s full-fledged move into courseware as a new business line to complement their standalone courses. Courseware is the combination of “the curriculum, the course materials, the assessments and, in some cases, the analytics to track student progress and make study suggestions” as described in Michael’s post “MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact“. In essence, courseware is everything but the instructor and interactive discussion, certification and support. This is what is meant by “wrapping” around a MOOC.

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  • The Right to Educational Access Paper, Part III

    Update: This paper can be found at the 20MM site and has also been broken into four separate posts on e-Literate:

    Focus on Student Rights and Perspectives

    Given these four approaches that California’s public higher education systems have available to address bottleneck courses, where should the state begin? There are important questions or organizational priorities for the three systems as well as faculty autonomy to consider. Unfortunately, much of the public discussion of online education issues has tended to focus on organizational needs or advocacy for the power of technology. Often what is lost in the shuffle is the perspective from those who are most impacted – the students.

    The key to addressing bottleneck course problems is to consider a new right for admitted students to have access to the courses they need. Rather than starting from the institutions and how they operate, the opportunity California higher education leaders and state government leaders have is to start from the perspective of the student’s rights and needs and then define institutional incentives to ensure those rights are preserved.

    The Right to Access

    Students enrolled in California public colleges and universities should be guaranteed timely access to the core courses that they are required to take in order to graduate. (more…)