e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Pedagogy

  • UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses

    Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie Mellon University. More specifically, the lecture was redesigned to bring students “out of the back row”, and the lab sections were flipped using OLI. Many efforts to personalize learning experiences end up increasing the amount of asynchronous pre-classroom time spent with courseware of some sort.

    At the University of Texas at Austin, the College of Liberal Arts is taking a different approach and focusing on the synchronous class time. The core of the course redesigns since 2013 centers on live lecture sessions created in a studio setting, with a small audience of students, streaming live to very large classes that can exceed 1,000 students each. They have named the approach Synchronous Massive Online Courses, or SMOCs. To get a sense of the problem UT Austin is trying to solve and why they have chosen the SMOC approach, watch this episode.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/WOFxl09KZhE)

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  • Teaching Using Adaptive Learning

    The entire six-part interview series with McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive learning experts is now up on YouTube. (Full disclosure: In the months between the filming and the publication of these videos, McGraw-Hill became a client of MindWires.) Here’s a good segment on teaching:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSqoc6Y_4No)

    The first example Matt Haldeman gives is a math class, which is where we see adaptive learning used the most. The interesting part of it is how he describes the change in the teacher’s classroom activities. This is a critical aspect this often isn’t picked up when these products are used in higher ed math classes—particularly outside of developmental math.

    The second example is a history class, which is a less (stereo)typical example. The focus is on class preparation. In other words, the adaptive platform helps students come to class knowing what you hope they’ll know but often haven’t really absorbed from a reading assignment that is meant to give them the raw materials they need for an interesting class discussion on a topic.

    Here’s the whole series, if you want to all six segments in order:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o&list=PLb2UcU-aVjN2aPSmGKILK2GHh6MgGswM9)

  • McGraw-Hill Education’s Perspective on Adaptive Learning

    Last spring, I had the opportunity to interview some of the top folks on McGraw-Hill Education’s (MHE’s) digital team to get their view on adaptive learning. Between ALEKS, LearnSmart, and SmartBooks, they have the developed the most well articulated adaptive strategy of any of the big publishers, under the leadership of Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster. And on a personal note, Al Essa, their Vice President of Research and Data Science, has been a friend since the days when he was CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and he and both were working on an open source LMS project. (Al also helped with analysis of the Blackboard patent back when he was at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and ran a simulation giving some matheatical rigour to Mike Caulfield’s intuition that some of Purdue University’s Course Signals research was off.) So I was interested to hear what MHE’s digital team had to say about the role of adaptive learning in the classroom, what learning science does and doesn’t tell us, and other related topics.

    For reasons that aren’t worth going into, this video sat in the can waiting to go into post-production for about six months. Here, finally, is the first segment in what will be a series produced from the interview:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o)

    More of the interview will be coming soon.

    Full disclosure: In the intervening months between when this video was shot and now, MHE became a client of MindWires.

  • Student-Centered Educational Software

    Last year I wrote a long rant about how the Gallup-Purdue survey studying the impact of higher education on wellbeing shows that our well-intentioned desire to ensure schools are providing a “quality education” is causing us to measure the wrong things in ways that deform the whole system. Well, the latest Gallup-Purdue survey results are out. Here are a couple of summary findings that Gallup has highlighted:

    Graduates who were “emotionally supported” — who strongly agreed they received support from professors who cared about them as a person and made them excited about learning, and from a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams — were twice as likely to be engaged in their work and almost twice as likely to be thriving in their well-being later in life.

    What’s more, graduates who had “experiential learning” — who strongly agreed they worked on long-term projects that took a semester or longer to complete; who had a job or internship where they applied what they were learning in the classroom; and who were extremely active in extracurricular activities — also doubled their odds of being engaged in their work later in life.

    These are impressive outcomes. Yet a quarter of all graduates strongly disagreed that they had any of these crucial experiences while they were at college. When it comes to providing students with the key experiences that will lead to success later in life, the U.S. higher education report card is poor.

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  • Explainer Video on Flipped Class, Learning Analytics, and Adaptive Learning

    We now have the second of our personalized learning explainer videos out. As a reminder, here’s the first one, which reframes personalized learning as a set of approaches for addressing the teaching problems of reaching hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/8wDw33NLuT0)

    The new one starts to talk about the how, giving flipped class, learning analytics, and adaptive learning as examples of tools or approaches that can help teachers reach those hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/USAHX56lWqE)

    Some folks continue to be confused about just how these things are supposed to help. We described some of our thinking in our original post on the first explainer and our recent piece in Inside Higher Ed. We are well aware of a number of hard limits on what we can accomplish, including but not limited to the following:

    • A couple of 3-minute videos are not going to change the world all by themselves.
    • The levers and barriers for change are different at different institutions.
    • Vendors are going to be out selling, the press is going to be out hyping, and institutional stakeholders are going to be looking for silver bullets no matter what.

    But we also find ourselves in the fortunate position of having some credibility with academic administrators, ed tech advocates, and vendors. If we can help our readers to nudge the inevitable and already ongoing conversations about courseware products in a more healthy direction, away from robot tutors in the sky and toward enabling teaching practices that reach more students, that would be a good thing. We’re creating these explainers as tools that can be used by any of the parties to those conversations to reframe the discussion. If we’re lucky, we’ll influence the ways in which the vendors pitch these products in the first place while also preparing educators to take advantage of the different pitch to ask more educationally relevant questions and nudge the procurement process in a healthier direction. We won’t always be so lucky. But we won’t always be unlucky either. A lot comes down to each of you and what you can accomplish in your respective contexts. We’re just trying to give you a few more tools to work with. You’re the change agents.

  • OSU Panel Discussion: Faculty experience with adaptive learning for Intro to Psychology course

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article and highlighted comments on vendors over-promising here at e-Literate. This time I’d like to highlight part of a panel discussion where a faculty member relates her experiences – what worked and what didn’t work – when using adaptive learning tools.

    Kathryn Becker-Blease has taught Intro to Psychology, a large lower-division lecture course, using both traditional quizzing and with adaptive quizzing with the help of Macmillan’s LearningCurve. In this part of the panel discussion Susana Rivera-Mills, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, asks Becker-Blease about her experiences based on research and teaching.

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  • Marketing Claims From Adaptive Learning Vendors As Barrier To Adoption

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.))  I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article.

    At one point I asked what people saw as risks or barriers to further adoption of adaptive learning courseware, and two people had very similar responses. In a nutshell, the over-active marketing claims from many vendors could be the biggest barrier. This is somewhat counter-intuitive as over-active marketing is commonly seen as the cause of technology being adopted even when it should not be. Listen to their responses (< 30 seconds).

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