e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Academics & Academia

The “Academics and Academia” category covers topics related the ways in which colleges and universities function that are relevant to technology-supported education. One key aspect covered here is pedagogy—how people teach—and how technology impacts teaching and learning.

But this category also includes more institutional aspects that are relevant to technology-supported education, such as how campus leadership supports (or doesn’t support) new initiatives, politics and bureaucracy that impact these efforts, and so on.

Finally, “Academics and Academia” covers commercial and non-profit services that provide support for technology-supported education initiatives, such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies.

  • New OER Survey: The disconnect between faculty caring and assigning

    In 2012 the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) put out a new report on usage and perceptions of open educational resources (OER) usage in higher education. Covered in this blog post, the 2012 report was really a combination of three separate surveys of academic leaders and faculty. In 2014 BSRG put out a new survey of faculty relating to OER, covered in this post, that I considered a significant milestone by providing actual data from a dedicated national survey to back up and clarify what many had assumed regarding OER. That report, however, was a one-off report, but the Hewlett Foundation and Pearson subsequently agreed to fund three annual longitudinal studies starting with the 2016 report released today. Per the press release:

    Key findings from the report include:

    • Faculty awareness of OER has increased, with 25% of faculty reporting that they were “Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational resources, up from 20% last year.
    • Only 5.3% of courses are using open textbooks (includes public domain and Creative Commons licensed).
    • Large enrollment introductory undergraduate courses have adopted openly licensed OpenStax College textbooks at twice the rate (10%) as openly licensed textbooks among all courses.
    • The most common factor cited by faculty when selecting educational resources was the cost to the students. After cost, the next most common was the comprehensiveness of the resource, followed by how easy it was to find.
    • There is a serious disconnect between how many faculty consider a factor in selecting educational resources and how satisfied they are with the state of that factor. Faculty are least satisfied with the cost of textbooks, yet that is the most commonly listed factor for why they select resources.
    • The barriers to adopting OER most often cited by faculty are that “there are not enough resources for my subject” (49%), it is “too hard to find what I need” (48%) and “there is no comprehensive catalog of resources” (45%).

    Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education covered this release and included additional interviews with co-author Jeff Seaman. (more…)

  • Personalized Learning Explainer: Teaching to the Back Row

    Phil and I are pleased to share our first animated explainer on personalized learning:

    If it feels like a commercial that could have been produced by a textbook publisher or ed tech vendor, that is entirely intentional. We hope that they will actively promote this video (and the successor that we will be publishing in the next couple of weeks). We are giving them tools they will (hopefully) want to use that move the focus away from product bells and whistles and toward teaching challenges. This attempt at jujitsu is worth some unpacking.

    (more…)

  • Personalized Learning at Law Schools

    I recently had the honor of speaking at the CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) conference. I was invited by one of my early heroes, John Mayer. When I first arrived on the ed tech blogging scene, John was already here, doing stuff. He inspired me.

    Anyway, you may or may not know that law schools are currently experiencing an enrollment crisis. As a result, they are accepting students who are below their normal standards. These students are, unsurprisingly, not doing as well (on average) as their predecessors. So I ask the question: Is the problem that the students are “worse,” or is it that nobody is actually teaching law school students, and that the ones being admitted could succeed if only somebody taught them?

    Here’s the video of the keynote, if you’re interested:

  • We’re Giving a Course on Personalized Learning Next Month

    Working with our good friends at ELI, we’re going to be offering a three-session synchronous course called Personalized Learning: Finding the Model That Fits Your Institution July 6th through 20th. As you know, we’re still in early days for personalized learning. Most campus communities are still trying to figure out what it is and what it’s good for—if they’re aware of it at all as a group. Plus, one size most emphatically does not fit all. The goal of the course is to help participants sharpen their own ideas for appropriate ways to facilitate exploration of the topic at their own institutions.

    The format will be highly participatory, especially in the second and third sessions. Phil and I expect that we will all learn a lot from each other.

    Join us!

  • Online Program Management: A view of the market landscape

    One of the fastest-growing market segments in ed tech, and one of the least-understood, is that of Online Program Management (OPM). It doesn’t help that the terms OPM, Online Enablers, Online Service Providers are used interchangeably, although OPM is the most common now.

    OPM providers are organizations (mostly for-profit companies, but with at least one non-profit variation) that help non-profit schools develop online programs, most often for Master’s level programs. These providers provide various services for which traditional institutions historically have not had the experience or culture to support. Some examples of the services include marketing & recruitment, enrollment management, curriculum development, online course design, student retention support, technology hosting, and student and faculty support.

    It would be useful to go beyond the label and get a broader view. (more…)

  • What Homework and Adaptive Platforms Are (and Aren’t) Good For

    I was delighted that we are able to publish Mike Caulfield’s post on how ed tech gets personalization backwards, partly because Mike is such a unique and inventive thinker, but also because he provided such a great example of how “personalized learning” teaching techniques are different than adaptive content and other product capabilities.

    The heart of his post is two stories about teachable moments he had with his daughters. In one, he helped his middle school-aged daughter understand why an Iranian author was worried that people in the Western world have harmful stereotypes of Iranians. In the other, he helped his high school aged-daughter see how her knowledge of the history of rocket science could be useful in answering a question she was asked about Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. Mike’s stories show truly significant learning of the kind that changes students’ perspectives and, if we’re lucky, their lives. It is not just personalized but deeply personal. He was able to reach his daughters because he understood them as humans, well beyond the boundaries of a list of competencies they had or had not mastered within the disciplines they were studying.

    For now and the foreseeable future, no robot tutor in the sky is going to be able to take Mike’s place in those conversations. This is the kind of personal teaching that humans are good at and robots are not. But neither are the tools we have today useless for this sort of teaching. Vendors, administrators, and faculty alike have broadly misunderstood their role and potential. In this post, I’m going to talk about both how these tools are useful for the kind of education that Mike cares about (and I care about) as well as, perhaps more importantly, why we are so prone to getting that role wrong.

    (more…)

  • We Have Personalization Backwards

    [Note – an earlier version of the first half of this post was first published at Mike’s Hapgood site. We asked him to make some alterations for the e-Literate audience and republish here. – ed]

    Indie Rock and Donald Trump

    I drive my oldest daughter to high school every day. She goes to a magnet STEM school in the district that’s on the campus where I work. I’ve been brainwashing her into liking indie rock one car ride at a time using carefully planned mix CDs.

    Last week she tells me I need to put more Magnetic Fields songs in the mix. Why? I ask.

    “Physics homework.” she says.

    It turns out that there’s a number of principles of physics that she remembers through a complex set of associations she’s developed referencing indie rock songs. I don’t pretend to get them all, but the 69 Love Songs hit “Meaningless” plays an apparently crucial role.

    Later that day, my youngest daughter is asking me about the book Persepolis, a book about growing up Iranian during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The author of that book spends the preface talking about the reasons she wrote it, and how she felt the understanding of her native country of Iran was too narrow, and in a way, too exotic. My daughter tells me that she doesn’t quite get what the author is talking about. After all, there’s a lot of fundamentalism in the early parts of the book — and people really are in a revolution in 1978, so what are we getting wrong in the West?

    I know that this daughter, a middle schooler, has had some stress about Donald Trump. She has people in her class who like him, and she can’t understand why when he’s so mean. It worries her.

    I ask her if Trump gets elected, how would she feel if everyone assumed all Americans were like Donald Trump. Well, we wouldn’t be, she says.

    Oh, she says.

    We Have Personalization Backwards

    (more…)