e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • Disclosure Update

    Regular readers know that we try to be as transparent as we can about the funding sources of our business, particularly when those sources are from organizations that we write about. This is an update about our relationship with a long-time funding organization: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

    We have been fortunate enough to receive a few grants from the foundation over the last few years. These grants were to fund coverage of digital education in general and courseware in particular. To their credit, the foundation respected our editorial independence over the years. Further, their support enabled us to create content that we hope will have enduring value. Here are a few examples:

    • Our piece defining the value of “personalized learning” in EDUCAUSE Review
    • Our analysis of the nuances behind SRI’s adaptive learning report in The Chronicle of Higher Education
    • Our animated explainers on various personalized learning concepts, like this one on memory-based adaptive learning:

    • Our case studies delving into the details of adaptive and personalized learning, like this one on the value of technology to make student activity more visible:

    From a mission perspective, we share the foundation’s aspirations of providing everyone with a quality education and, in particular, of closing achievement gaps. But we are rethinking how we can be most effective at contributing to the achievement of those aspirations. In part through the foundation’s grants and our broader participation in the network of grantees, we have learned some lessons about what does and doesn’t work in terms of promoting effective practices. Over time, we have developed our own theory of change.

    We have decided to put our money where our mouth is and form the Empirical Educator Project to test our theory. As a consequence of our commitment to and focus on this new effort, we have decided not to pursue another round of funding from BMGF for continued within the foundation’s current framework. Making this decision also enables us to advance another of our goals, which is to decrease our financial dependence on any particular influencer in the market, particularly when it comes to direct funding of our reporting and analysis.

     

    We wish the foundation staff and grantee network the best of luck in their pursuit of our mutual goals and hope to find ways in which we can collaborate with them in other capacities over time as we work toward our mutual aspirations for education.

  • New e-Literate TV Episode: Adaptive Learning and Learning Analytics

    In our latest episode, the penultimate in the pilot series, we explore the topics that are likely to be moving up the curve of the hype cycle this year—adaptive learning and learning analytics.  Like many of the topics in the pilot series, we could have made an entire series about this one. (And maybe we will at some point.) But since the first adaptive learning product faculty will run into is most likely to be from a textbook publisher, we interviewed McGraw Hill’s Al Essa and Pearson’s Jason Jordan about their respective takes on what this trend is all about.

    Here it is.

  • Another e-Literate TV Episode is Up

    The other day, I wrote a post about community-negotiated focus and how we want e-Literate TV to be a kind of “choose your own adventure in ed tech” experience, both for individuals and for campus communities. You can get a sense of how we’re trying to do that in the first series with Phil’s interview of Inside Higher Education Editors Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik. They talk about the changing landscape of education, why different topics in educational technology come up in the first place, and how the ways in which those topics are raised can have either a positive or a negative impact. This is the anchor episode for the series and is intended to provoke discussion that would lead to the group finding a focus in their collaborative ed tech investigation that’s important to them.

    Take a look.

  • The First e-Literate TV Episode Is Up!

    Phil and I are thrilled to announce the release of our pilot e-Literate TV episode.

    Take a look.

    One thing you’ll want to pay attention to is the set of buttons in the upper left-hand corner of the TELLING STORY player:

    Screen Shot 2014-02-12 at 10.59.06 AM

    These buttons correspond to the three modes available to you. From left to right:

    • Watch is a lot like a closed captioned YouTube experience. The focus is on the video.
    • Discover still puts a lot of emphasis on the video, but it also will selectively show related links and graphics. If any of them catch your fancy, you can click on them to take a deeper dive.
    • Explore mode is for when you want the video to be playing in the background but you’re really focusing on the transcript and the supplementary resources (or “transmedia”).

    We’re pretty excited about these capabilities and are eager to hear from you about how they work for you and how you might use them. They look beautiful on tablets, too!

    In terms of content, we’re only launching one episode for now because we want to flight test the technology before we put out the full series, but we expect to publish the rest in about two weeks.

    This one happens to be just Phil and me, but most of these episodes will be conversations with other people. You can get a good sense of what this will feel like from the videos we shot (with our partners IN THE TELLING) at the MOOC Research conference. These will be both released on their own and incorporated into an e-Literate TV series.

    For example, here’s Phil’s interview with Dave Cormier about different kinds of MOOCs and their different uses:

    Here’s my interview with Simon Buckingham Shum about how analytics can help us learn more about student learning, both in MOOCs and in other types of online learning experiences:

    And here’s my interview with Stanford’s Keith Devlin talking about why he is passionate about MOOCs:

    Phil and I will have a lot more to say about ETV in the coming days, and we’re very interested in your feedback. For now, since we’re prompting for a specific feedback question at the end of the episode on the ETV site, please give us your comments on it that aren’t related to the prompt question right here. In the coming days, we intend to add richer and broader discussion capabilities directly to the site.

  • e-Literate TV Update and Request for Help

    We are fast approaching the release of our first e-Literate TV (ETV) series. Our latest estimate is that we will go live in mid-February with a collection of interview episodes filmed at EDUCAUSE 2013 covering the following topics:

    1. An overview of challenges in higher education that are driving conversations about educational technology
    2. A review of the online learning landscape
    3. A discussion MOOC mania
    4. An exploration of the genre of courseware
    5. A conversation about the basics of learning analytics and adaptive learning
    6. A review of one faculty member’s experience with classroom flipping

    Meanwhile, we are already hard at work on the second series, which will be called “Massive and Open: What Are We Learning?” Filmed primarily at the the MOOC Research Initiative Conference, the series takes a deeper dive into how people are actually using the tools that MOOCs offer in different contexts and discusses their promise as well as their problems. We expect this to be the model for future series, where we explore one topic from a number of angles rather than offering a smorgasbord like the pilot series. We have a long list of topics we’d like to cover in future series, ranging from increasing educational access to personalized learning to the promise and perils of big data in education and more.

    With the release of the first series around the corner, Phil and I would like to tell you more about our ideas for ETV and request your feedback and (verbal) support.

    (more…)

  • More on Pearson and Change

    I am amazed at the number of comments we have gotten already on the other day’s Pearson post. Don’t you people have better things to do on a holiday than read and comment on 7,000-word blog posts about textbook publishers (asks the man who spent his holiday writing a 7,000-word blog post about a textbook publisher)? Seriously, I am humbled by your commitment. For those of you who subscribe to comments on this blog by email, I’m afraid that is no longer a reliable way to track the conversation. We have integrated Google+ into our blog posts which has the benefit of attracting more commenters and longer conversations at the cost of having two different commenting systems running simultaneously and no good way to track or integrate them. Unfortunately, we are back to the days where you have to go to the page periodically to see what is happening, at least for now.

    Anyway, unsurprisingly, there is a lot of skepticism about Pearson and also the notion of “efficacy” among the commenters. There is also some discussion about the complexity of how we define (or fail to define) the goals education and how the lack of clearly articulated goals makes any attempt to measure efficacy problematic. (Efficacious at what?) This is a point I’ve been trying to make in different ways and for different audiences in several recent posts. Larry Cuban has a timely blog post up on the history of this problem in math education.

    Meanwhile, Carrie Saarinen has a more positive take on the idea of efficacy. I met Carrie at the NERCOMP LMS unConference, when she was working at Brown University. She has since been hired by Instructure (to their great credit). I highly recommend reading Carrie’s post and following her blog.

  • The Year in e-Literacy

    I’m generally conflicted about year-end lists of top blog posts because there is no single way to order the list that is truly reflective of the conversations that we’ve been having together on the blog. But after finding Audrey Watters’ list for Hack Education so interesting I thought, “Oh, what the heck.”

    First, some general stats:

    • We published 148 blog posts in 2013, bringing the total of posts on e-Literate to 1,116.
    • We had about 310,000 visitors during the course of the year
    • The most common search terms that led people to the blog (excluding variations on the blog name) were “moocs”, “lms market size”, and “mcgraw hill education”.
    • We had visitors from 193 countries around the world.

    Here are the top five posts as measured by the number of views:

    1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield (with a whopping 87 comments on it, I might add)
    2. “The Most Thorough Summary To Date of MOOC Completion Rates” in February 2013 by Phil Hill
    3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
    4. “State of the Higher Education LMS Market: A Graphical View” in September 2012 by Phil Hill
    5. “Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A Graphical View” in March 2013 by Phil Hill

    If we look at the number of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” ratings that readers gave to posts, the top five were as follows:

    1. “Six Ways the edX Automated Grading Announcement Gets It Wrong” in April 2013 by Elijah Mayfield
    2. “A Taxonomy of Adaptive Analytics Strategies” in March 2013 by Michael Feldstein
    3. “A Response to the USA Today Article on Flipped Classroom Research” in October 2013 by Phil Hill
    4. “Cengage MindTap and the Evolution of Courseware” in May 2013 by Michael Feldstein
    5. “Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Improve Teaching” in January 2013 by Michael Feldstein

    And if we look at the number of social media mentions in Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbedUpon, and Pinterest, then the top five are as follows:

    1. “Why the Google Art Project is Important” in May 2013 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
    2. “‘Can I Use This?’ How Museum Image Policies Undermine Education” in November 2012 by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
    3. “Google Apps for Education: When Will It Replace the LMS?” in April 2012 by Audrey Watters
    4. “U.S. Claims Global Jurisdiction for .com and .net Web Sites: Is .edu Next?” in January 2012 by Jim Farmer
    5. “Why Higher Education Is In Trouble, In One Graph” in March 2011 by Michael Feldstein

    I would like to provide the top five most commented posts, but since we have integrated Google+ into our post pages a lot of our readers are commenting through that system rather than through WordPress, and I have no way of combining those numbers accurately.

    At any rate, by any measure you choose, Phil and I are thrilled with the year we’ve had. We are humbled by the wonderful featured bloggers who have graced our pages—people like Elijah Mayfield, Mike Caulfield, Bill Jerome, Audrey Watters, Jim Farmer, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker—and deeply grateful for all of you who have taken the time to read, share, think about, and respond to what we have written.

    We look forward to an even better year with you in 2014.