As Phil and I have been saying all along—most recently in my last post, which mentioned ECC’s use of adaptive learning—the software is, at best, an enabler. It’s the work that the students and teachers do around the software that makes the difference. Or not. In ECC’s case, they are trying to implement a pretty radical change in pedagogy with an at-risk population. It’s worth digging into the details.
Academics and 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.
The Fraught Interaction Design of Personalized Learning Products
David Wiley has a really interesting post up about Lumen Learning’s new personalized learning platform. Here’s an excerpt: A typical high-level approach to personalization might include: building up an internal model of what a student knows and can do, algorithmically interrogating that model, and providing the learner with a unique set of learning experiences based […]
Challenge Of Student Transition Between Active And Passive Learning Models
Last week the Hechinger Report profiled an innovative charter school in San Diego called High Tech High (insert surfer jokes here) that follows an active, project based learning (PBL) model. The school doesn’t use textbooks, and they don’t base the curriculum on testing. The question they ask is whether this approach prepares students for college. […]
ED and CBE: Example of higher ed “structural barrier to change” that is out of institutions’ control
There has been a great conversation going on in the comments to my recent post “Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes” on too many relevant issues to summarize (really, go read the ongoing comment thread). They mostly center on the institution and faculty reward system, yet those are not the only sources of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]