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, […]
Research
"Research" examines academic studies of technology-enabled education initiatives, including the quality of the research and of its coverage in the press.
17% Of Community Colleges Are Not Included In College Scorecard
In addition to the highly-misleading usage of ‘first-time full-time’ qualification for official graduate rates reported in the College Scorecard, there appears to be another major issue with the data. 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. […]
Personalized Learning is Hard
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.
68 Percent of Statistics Are Meaningless, Purdue University Edition
Purdue University has been happy to take credit for essentially inventing the retention early warning analytics category. But are they willing to take responsibility for putting out a flawed efficacy study? Eh, not so much.
IBM’s Misleading or Just Incorrect National Ad on Student Retention
Thanks to Chris Edwards for alerting me to this one. In a nutshell, IBM launched a national ad campaign last month that included commercials during Wimbledon on the weekend. They’re spending big money on this campaign about big data, learning analytics, and reducing “dropout rates” [emphasis added below]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiv4X1K7iX4 In the US, 3 in 10 […]
Giving D2L Credit Where Credit Is Due
Michael and I have made several specific criticisms of D2L’s marketing claims lately culminating in this blog post about examples based on work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and California State University at Long Beach (CSULB). I understand that other ed tech vendors make marketing claims that cannot always be tied to reality, but these […]
Promising Research Results On Specific Forms Of Adaptive Learning / ITS
Recently I described an unpublished study by Dragan Gasevic and team on the use of Knowillage / LeaP adaptive platform.1 The context of article was on D2L’s misuse of the results, but the study itself is interesting in terms of its findings that adaptive learning usage (specifically LeaP in addition to Moodle within an Intro […]