e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Strategy & Change Management

  • 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 and changing.

    While I agree with his primary point about false narratives with simplistic no-change assumptions, I think there is a risk about going too far the other direction. Universities have certainly changed, and there are many innovations within universities, but universities are not very good about diffusing the innovations that they do make. I made this same argument here and here. ((The first article had more of a technology focus, but the same applies to the pedagogical side of change.)) Campus changes are apparent, but too often I see innovative course designs showing real results, but courses in the same department remain unchanged.

    In my opinion Universities are exceptional at innovating, but they are not exceptional at changing.
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  • 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 well known that much of the instruction in lower division classes at large universities is led not by faculty but by TAs. This situation is often seen as a weakness of the business model of a research university, but it can also be leveraged as an opportunity to lead educational change. Consider this interview with staff from the iAMSTEM group at UC Davis from our e-Literate TV series on personalized learning:


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  • 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 December the New York Times published an article highlighting work done at the University of California at Davis to transform large lecture classes into active learning formats.

    Hundreds of students fill the seats, but the lecture hall stays quiet enough for everyone to hear each cough and crumpling piece of paper. The instructor speaks from a podium for nearly the entire 80 minutes. Most students take notes. Some scan the Internet. A few doze.

    In a nearby hall, an instructor, Catherine Uvarov, peppers students with questions and presses them to explain and expand on their answers. Every few minutes, she has them solve problems in small groups. Running up and down the aisles, she sticks a microphone in front of a startled face, looking for an answer. Students dare not nod off or show up without doing the reading. (more…)

  • Unizin Updates on Florida State System and Acquisition of Courseload

    I’m not sure when e-Literate was awarded the exclusive rights for non-PR Unizin coverage, but there were two announcements this week to cover.

    State University System of Florida Joins

    The first announcement is an update and confirmation of my recent post about the new associate membership option. If a member institution (one of the 11 members paying $1.050 million) sponsors their statewide system, that system can join Unizin as “associate members” for $100 thousand per year but without retaining a board seat and vote on product direction. The week the State University System of Florida (SUSFL) announced they are joining Unizin.

    Building on its growing record of collaboration, the State University System of Florida, comprised of Florida’s 12 public universities, has joined Unizin, a group with a mission to have more control and influence over the digital learning ecosystem. (more…)

  • Unizin Perspective: Personalized learning’s existence and distance education experience

    By reading the Unizin pitch for the State University System of Florida shared yesterday, we can see quite a few claims about the (potential) benefits to be provided by the consortium. “Make sure that the universities were not cut out of [distance ed] process”; “Secure our foothold in the digital industry”; “Promote greater control and influence over the digital learning ecosystem”; Provide “access to the Canvas LMS at the Unizin price”; Provide “access to tools under development, including a Learning Object Repository and Learning Analytics”; Provide “potential for cooperative relationships to ‘share’ digital instruction within and across the consortium”.

    I want to pick up on University of Florida provost Joe Glover’s further comment on Learning Analytics, however.

    The third goal for Unizin is to acquire, create, or develop learning analytics. Some of the learning management systems have a rather primitive form of learning analytics. Unizin will build on what they have, and this will go from very mechanical types of learning analytics in terms of monitoring student progress and enabling intrusive advising and tutoring; all the way up to personalized learning, which is something that really does not exist yet but is one of the objectives of Unizin.

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  • Instructor Replacement vs. Instructor Role Change

    Two weeks ago I wrote a post about faculty members’ perspective on student-centered pacing within a course. What about the changing role of faculty members – how do their lives change with some of the personalized learning approaches?

    In the video below, I spoke with Sue McClure, who teaches a redesigned remedial math course at Arizona State University (ASU) that is based on the use of Khan Academy videos. There are plenty of questions about whether this approach works and is sustainable, but for now let’s just get a first-hand view of how Sue’s role changed in this specific course. You’ll see that it took some prodding to get her to talk about her personal experience, and I did have to reflect back what I was hearing. Note that the “coaches” she described are teaching assistants.

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  • Worth Considering: Faculty perspective on student-centered pacing

    Over the weekend I wrote a post based on the comment thread at Friday’s Chronicle article on e-Literate TV.

    One key theme coming through from comments at the Chronicle is what I perceive as an unhealthy cynicism that prevents many people from listening to students and faculty on the front lines (the ones taking redesigned courses) on their own merits.

    Sunday’s post highlighted two segments of students describing their experiences with re-designed courses, but we also need to hear directly from faculty. Too often the public discussion of technology-enabled initiatives focus on the technology itself, often assuming that the faculty involved are bystanders or technophiles. But what about the perspectives of faculty members – you know, those who are in the classrooms working with real students – on what challenges they face and what changes are needed from an educational perspective? There is no single perspective from faculty, but we could learn a great deal through their unique, hands on experiences. (more…)