The Department of Education’s new tool for evaluating colleges is…uh…not so great.
Big Picture
The "Big Picture" category covers larger trends and topics that influence both the problems that technology can help address in education as well as the barriers to implementing high-quality technology-supported education. This includes research-based topics such as learning science and program effectiveness studies, philosophical discussions such as outcomes definitions, and macro-forces such as government policy, markets, and business models.
TechCrunch: “EdTech – 2017’s big, untapped and safe investor opportunity”
David Bainbridge, CEO of UK-based Knowledgemotion, wrote a post on Saturday in TechCrunch titled “Edtech is the next fintech” calling out the huge, untapped potential of EdTech. Thanks to Alan Levine for sharing this one. Spoiler alert: But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunities edtech promises the world’s largest content providers, […]
Instructurecon 2016: Why This Company is Still Formidable (and Misunderstood)
When I talk to Instructure competitors or critics, I usually hear two complaints about them: They “open wash” or are “fauxpen.” They have no vision. Having attended Instructurecon 2016 a couple of weeks ago, my answer to the first complaint is that the critics don’t understand what Instructure and their customers mean by “openness.” In […]
MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong
New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up. Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently […]
Reprise: How Much Do Community College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks?
Last month the nonprofit advocacy group Achieving the Dream announced a new initiative to fund 38 community colleges who are willing to build entire programs with open educational resources. While this is a noble effort aimed at reducing financial barriers for students to get two-year degrees, the group perpetuated the same myth that has plagued higher education for years.
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 […]
Adaptive Learning Fails to Make the Grade. Or Does It?!
More than anything else, SRI’s meta-analysis of adaptive learning studies shows that we won’t be able to prove what works until we start designing better and more consistent studies.