I have written several posts looking at the new College Scorecard and its inherent flaws in the data, often starting with observations from Russ Poulin at WCET. Today Susan Svrluga, education reporter at the Washington Post, posted a new article co-written by me and Russ and titled “Hundreds of colleges missing from Obama’s College Scorecard?”. The […]
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.
Yes, I did say that Knewton is “selling snake oil”
A “robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile”? Really?
Instructure Files for IPO
This doesn’t exactly come as a shock, but Instructure has filed for an IPO, and is expecting a post-IPO valuation of somewhere between $500 million and $800 million. Whenever a private company does this, they have to file a form called an S-1 with the SEC, which contains all kinds of financial and strategic information. […]
Cracks In The Foundation Of Disruptive Innovation
The overuse of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory has rightly been criticized in education circles for years. I say rightly in that judging a non-commodity public good with the same theory as disk drives is a silly notion without some extensive analysis to back up that extrapolation. As Audrey Watters wrote in 2013: Rather, my assigning […]
Forbes Fantasies: Why Hillsdale College is not in the College Scorecard (hint, boring reasons)
Richard Vedder wrote a particularly uninformed article in Forbes on Friday about the Education Department (ED) not including Hillsdale College in the new College Scorecard. Freed from the burden of facts or research, Vedder let loose the dogs of conspiracy [emphasis in original]. The Obama Administration, with much hype, released its College Scorecard recently, designed to […]
The University As Ed Tech Startup: UMUC, Global Campus, Texas, and SNHU roll their own
Today the University of Maryland University Campus (UMUC) announced its plans to spin off their Office of Analytics into a separate for-profit ed tech company. The University System of Maryland Board of Regents today approved a University of Maryland University College (UMUC) plan to spin off its Office of Analytics into a new company, HelioCampus, that […]
College Scorecard Problem Gets Worse: One in three associate’s degree institutions are not included
Late yesterday I posted about the Education Department (ED) new College Scorecard and how it omits a large number of community colleges based on an arbitrary metric. In particular, the Education Department (ED) is using a questionable method of determining whether an institution is degree-granting rather than relying on the IPEDS data source. In a nutshell, […]