e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Curricular-Materials

This category includes digital curricular materials, including adaptive learning, assessments, OER, etc.

  • The Course Hero/Lumen Deal

    The Course Hero/Lumen Deal

    EdSurge’s Daniel Mollencamp has published a piece called “What a Homework Help Site’s Move to Host Open Educational Resources Could Mean” about Lumen Learning’s deal with Course Hero to transfer hosting of those OER textbooks from Lumen’s site to Course Hero’s. The article contains a fair bit of speculation quotes from folks who I believe miss the mark on some basic facts and implications. I confess that I will engage in some informed speculation here in the sense that I have not engaged with on-the-ground reporting to confirm what I believe I know. Nevertheless, I believe I know some facts that contradict some of the speculation in the piece and put the transaction in a somewhat different light.

    For most of this piece, I’m going to stick with what I believe to be the facts. I will take a little time in the last section to provide my own point of view. That said, there are strong feelings in pockets of the educational community about both of these companies. I will be treading lightly. If you want to read vehement critiques of these companies, their business models, and their values, you can find them elsewhere on the web.

    The basic facts as I understand them

    Here’s what I believe to be true:

    • Lumen has had two branded lines of OER-based products:
      • Waymaker is their flagship product line. They invest in editorial work and research to improve the content and software development to improve the underlying platform on which it is hosted.
      • Candela are OER products that were contributed by the community but not actively maintained and improved by Lumen. They were hosted on a less capable platform. And, to my knowledge, they were free.
    • Lumen transferred Candela products, but not Waymaker products, to Course Hero.
    • Lumen received quite a bit of traffic to those free OER content. I seem to recall Kim telling me the number was in the millions of visits. That’s great for education but is also an expense for a small company. While I know some will dismiss the cost of hosting web pages on the internet, the cost of hosting content with that much traffic and keeping it accessible can add up over time.
    • The business value of Candela courses to Lumen was far from clear. It’s not like students using the content for free were likely to become paying customers or convert their faculty to adopting Waymaker products. Again, hosting the content is a good thing to do. But every company has a limit of how much they can afford to invest in public-good work. I don’t know how much Candela costs to host and maintain relative to Lumen’s total revenues. I speculate that it was non-trivial.
    • On the other hand, Course Hero’s primary clientele is students. Every user of Candela is a potential subscriber to Course Hero’s paid services. And Course Hero is a vastly bigger company. So the relative cost of hosting the content was smaller to them than to Lumen and the potential business benefit was larger.
    • As I alluded to in my introduction, both companies have vocal detractors.
      • In Lumen’s case, their primary critics tend to be within a subsection of the OER community and relate to which business models in relation to OER are considered “legitimate” or support the values of the OER community.
      • In the case of Course Hero, the controversy is more widespread. They are criticized as being a “cheat site.” Some universities are blocking access to Course Hero from school networks and I hear periodic rumors of plans for legal action against the company, although I am not aware of any actual litigation.
    • [Update] I have heard multiple complaints that Candela students were redirected from Lumen’s site to Course Hero’s site with no notification to instructors or universities, including paying customers. (See the correction below for more detail on “paying customers.”)
    • I do not believe the content was editable on either site. I’m certain it’s not currently editable on Course Hero’s site and I’m fairly confident that it was not editable in Candela on Lumen’s site.

    Corrections: A source informed me that I was mistaken on two fronts. First, Lumen did charge a low price for the version of Candela that integrated with LMSs. I do not believe it was a money maker for Lumen, and I’m confident that the free, non-integrated version got significant traffic. While this doesn’t change the overall business implications, I got the facts wrong. Unfortunately, this also means that some of those affected by the switch were paying customers.

    Second, Candela did support editing.

    Implications

    First, the business logic for both companies is clear. Hosting OER content for free is a public service that has non-zero cost, particularly if it is successful at attracting significant volume. Hosting a catalog of free online textbooks simply costs less and buys more for a company like Course Hero than it does for a company like Lumen. I make not value judgment here, one way or the other. These are simple economics.

    By I suspect—and this is pure speculation on my part—that Course Hero did pay Lumen, at least to cover the costs of supporting the content transfer. I don’t know the details of any potential transaction but I don’t see any ethical red flags with it, at least as a stand-alone issue. I’d have to see some sign of some other, ethically problematic quid pro quo which is not evident in the reporting.

    Second, these details (assuming their accuracy) tend to cut against some of the commentary in the article. For example, while I respect Bryan Alexander, I don’t think the facts support the speculation that “Lumen handing over the content to Course Hero seems like it could plausibly be them agreeing with those who think there’s no good business case for OER.”

    Likewise, Steel Wagstaff from Pressbooks, in my opinion, missed the mark on a couple of points. The first was when he suggested that “Although the content has an open license, it’s conceivable that it will be harder for technical reasons to edit and make copies of the content on Course Hero’s platform, depending on what Course Hero is doing to host the content.” My understanding is that it is neither easier nor harder. Neither platform supports native editing. To change the content, one would have to copy and paste the content in a platform that does support editing such as Google Docs or Pressbooks.

    Correction: Steel was correct. Candela, unlike Waymaker, did allow for editing. (I’m not sure if it was available in the free version of the product; see the correction above.)

    Wagstaff is also paraphrased in the article as saying, “If your main interest in OER is to adopt a book for free, then the hosting change isn’t such a big deal, except perhaps that people “feel scuzzy” about Course Hero being the ones hosting the content[.]”

    This is where things get messy. And sometimes nasty.

    Course Hero’s reputation and some circumscribed commentary

    “Scuzzy” vastly understates the breadth and depth of feeling currently swirling around Course Hero. And that concern is likely the reason this transfer of free content between two companies generated enough noise to get the attention of EdSurge.

    Before I get into further commentary, I want to state my priors here. I know the leadership of both companies. In Lumen’s case, I’ve known CEO Kim Thanos and her co-founder, David Wiley, for many years. I consider them to be friends. I trust their values even when I don’t agree with particular decisions. I know Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer and his leadership team less well. But I have had a number of interactions with them, spent some time vetting them, and came away feeling good about the humans in charge. My best read on them, given the caveat that I don’t know them terribly well, is that they want to be constructive partners in supporting education. I have worked with both companies in the past (though not recently) and have no qualms or regrets about having done so. With that in mind, here’s my take on the story:

    Currently, Course Hero is widely and often vehemently viewed as a bad actor that helps students cheat within a significant slice of university educators and administrators. It’s not particularly easy to get your website blocked by a major public university and yet I personally know of a handful that have blocked Course Hero. EdSurge likewise states that “some campus networks have actually blocked Course Hero’s core service domains”.

    This state of affairs, combined with the companies’ mutual decision to roll out the change quietly, had two serious implications. First, universities that have encouraged students to use free OER hosted by Lumen suddenly started hearing from their students that they cannot access these resources. Second, students could not access those resources because the content has been quietly moved to a web site that important university stakeholders decided was harmful enough that they blocked it from university networks. They believe that Course Hero undermines their policies and contributes to students’ failure to learn. To add insult to injury, I heard from folks at several of these universities that they first heard about the switch from panicked students who couldn’t access their course materials after the term had started rather than from Lumen or Course Hero beforehand. These leaders feel blindsided.

    Both companies appear to have been taken by surprise at the level of backlash. In fact, Course Hero’s Vice President of Academics Sean Michael Morris is quoted in the EdSurge article as saying, “Part of this news cycle around this caught us off guard.”

    Morris’s reaction is shockingly tone-deaf from beginning to end. First of all, referring to this reaction as a “news cycle” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the seriousness of the brand problem Course Hero has. He actually jokes about universities unblocking their site as a solution to the problem. And he never once addresses the underlying issue of trust that caused the site to be blocked in the first place.

    This has been my deepest concern with Course Hero, which has only grown with time. Although I still believe they are not intentional bad actors, they have the instincts of a consumer company catering to students and show little understanding of universities. And while they have made earnest efforts to reach out to and understand their critics—I have participated in some of those conversations—they demonstrate at times like these that they remain dangerously naive about the stakeholders inside the institutions they want to work with.

    They have made good inroads with adjunct faculty. But incidents like this one, and their reaction to it, suggest that they have made little progress in understanding, much less winning over, the kinds of stakeholders who can block on-campus access to their site or even initiate legal action. And to be clear, I have heard more than one senior campus leader intimate that such actions were being contemplated.

    Lumen, while it has been quieter, also seems to have been caught flat-footed. I am hearing from multiple long-time customers who have been put in a very difficult position by their lack of advance communication. Lumen needs its advocates and can’t afford to burn these bridges.

    This was entirely avoidable

    The two companies missed a chance to turn a potential blow-back into a trust-winning opportunity. They could have done something like the following:

    • Announced in advance that the two companies are working on a sustainability strategy to keep the OER accessible for free to students
    • Selectively sought input from Candela-using educators and campuses about the best way to do this
    • Created a separate site with a separate URL, hosted by Course Hero, that would have bought them more goodwill at the cost of some easy customer conversion

    I don’t want to pretend that everything would have been rosy had they taken this path. The companies each have critics that would have come after them no matter what they did. So I understand the impulse to do this quietly.

    But it obviously didn’t save them from the slings and arrows. Instead, it alienated Lumen’s allies while reinforcing rather than softening Course Hero’s reputation of being an enemy of university folk.

    To sum up my own reading of the events in question, this story does not portend doom and gloom for OER. Nor does it provide convincing evidence of nefarious profiteering by Lumen. This is the story of two companies, each driven by enlightened self-interest, that screwed up a mutual effort to preserve access to free educational resources with a gob-smacking level of tone-deafness.

    This story also tells us something about how OER does and doesn’t work in supporting different sorts of business models (e.g., Lumen’s and Course Hero’s, which are starkly different).

    These companies obviously have some thinking to do and need to do a far better job of staunching the bleeding.

    In the meantime, the academic community needs to get far more sophisticated in their thinking about how sustainability works when OER gets used as infrastructure in a for-profit EdTech world. Keep in mind that another option Lumen had at its disposal was to simply turn Candela off. That would have benefitted nobody.

    I’m not going to pretend I have an answer or even pretend that I believe there is a one-size-fits-all answer. But we need better answers about sustainability at scale, balancing cost against quality, and harnessing the theoretical affordance of editability into something that actually serves students. I believe those answers will come, in part, from studying how different EdTech companies make their money and how the business mechanics interact with OER. After all, the foundation of OER is a copyright license. It may hack the private property system but it does not live outside of that system. We don’t have to look for evil motives to understand why Lumen and Course Hero thought moving stewardship of Candela might be good for everyone. It’s actually pretty straightforward.

    So how do we cultivate companies whose business interests benefit from promoting affordable, quality education? And where does OER fit into that equation?

  • Cengage Author Moves to OER: The Implications

    Cengage Author Moves to OER: The Implications

    Derek Newton called out in his Forbes column that a Cengage organic chemistry author is releasing the 10th edition of his book as OER via OpenStax. Newton is right to call this out as significant. That said, his column contains a lot of speculation about what this could mean or might mean. Fair enough. There’s a lot we don’t know.

    In this post, I’m going to tease out some of the implications that Newton doesn’t talk about.

    What we do and don’t know

    Before I do that, though, it’s worth reiterating some of the basic facts and unknowns covered in Newton’s column. An author for Cengage whose book sold well enough to go through nine editions decided to take his tenth edition to OpenStax and publish it as OER. The author, John McMurry, characterized it as a tribute to his son who passed away. Cengage is outwardly supporting McMurry’s decision and is promoting the added value of WebAssign, which Cengage owns.

    We don’t know the degree to which this decision was amicable and mutual. For reasons I’ll get into later in this post, it’s possible that both sides were comfortable with it. It’s also possible that McMurry’s contract came up for renewal and Cengage decided to make the best of his decision to bolt. We don’t know and probably never will. We also don’t know if other successful authors will follow suit. I mean no insult to McMurry when I observe that he profited from the first nine editions of his book before opening up the tenth. I don’t blame authors for wanting to be compensated for their hard work. That said, authors who have signed with a publisher more recently haven’t gotten anything like the kind of deal that McMurry likely had. So incentives are shifting.

    The platform theory

    Newton, following the cues from the press release, sees this as a movement of publishers selling their platforms as the underlying books commoditize. The problem with this theory is that publishers across the sector have been disinvesting in their platforms. WebAssign was built in 1997 and I don’t have reason to believe that it’s been significantly upgraded in quite some time. Cengage is far from alone in this. Pearson’s platforms are ancient too. I’m hearing and seeing that, by and large, all the publishers are backing off tech investment. Even McGraw-Hill and Wiley, which have been the most tech-forward of their cohort in recent years, appear to have slowed investment.

    This is not to say that Newton is wrong or that Cengage is disingenuous about promoting the package. Rather, it should be considered a holding action. Cengage, like several of its peers, is owned by private equity. While these companies can support investment and acquisition, they tend to marshall their resources very carefully. Especially for assets that show a consistent trendline of shrinking businesses, like textbook publishers. By and large, the publishers are milking their aging platforms for as much revenue as possible while investing as little in new tech as possible. It is not a new strategy.

    The economics

    It’s worth noting that the PDF of McMurry’s ninth edition costs $40.99 to rent for one term.

    A PDF. For one term.

    Yes, it’s true that prices have come down a great deal on textbooks in recent years. But $41 to rent a PDF?

    Of course, that’s not the option Cengage wants students to choose. The first option on that page is a subscription to Cengage Unlimited, which is $69.99 for a four-month all-you-can-eat subscription. They’re trying to move to a model where they don’t care if they lose pricing power on individual items because they can charge for the bundle.

    This is a challenging model for a publisher to make worthwhile for students. Either they have to ensure that the students’ professors are adopting several Cengage products every term, which is challenging due to academic freedom, or they have to provide more products that are direct-to-student, in which case they’ll be competing with the likes of Quizlet and, increasingly, Course Hero.

    The bottom line

    Cengage has a courseware platform called MindTap. They could have invested in creating a more seamless experience with more context by building on that platform. But they didn’t. That tells us something about their strategy. For them, this is all about the economics of Cengage Unlimited.

    Publishers are struggling. All of their moves right now are defensive. (By the way, I predict that Pearson will sell off its higher ed business—possibly including their OPM—to private equity within six months.) The problem is that, given the natural path that the industry is taking, the student experience is still terrible and the cost, while better than a few years ago, is still hard to justify given the quality of these tech-enabled products.

    And as far as I can tell, the sector is not moving toward replacing them with something better.

    Correction: An earlier version of this post included references to Aktiv Chemstry, which also is working with the McMurry book. Those references were removed due to inaccuracies.

  • New Argos Post on Optimizing for Educator Effectiveness

    New Argos Post on Optimizing for Educator Effectiveness

    The phrase “empowering educators” is a cliché that usually doesn’t mean much. We could use the language of business—as I have—to describe educators as knowledge workers and think about optimizing their workflows to reduce the amount of time they spend on low-value tasks and increase their opportunities to apply their expert judgment to high-value tasks. That formulation provides a more specific, testable, and potentially impactful description at the risk of turning off a lot of educators with the language. Having been both a classroom educator and a corporate knowledge worker myself, I believe these are two sides of the same coin. In my most recent post on the Argos blog (following my post that introduces what will be a four-post arc), I explore this topic with some concrete examples.

    If I weren’t co-founder of Argos, I would be publishing these posts here on e-Literate. Argos, for me, is an effort to actually bring into the world some of the ideas that I’ve advocated for here on this blog for the better part of two decades. It’s an attempt to apply everything that my co-founder and I have learned about the barriers to change to make a real and lasting impact on education. Which is all I’ve ever wanted, professionally. I never had any inherent desire to run—or even work in—a start-up. It just turned out to be the best vehicle we could find for accomplishing something as important as it is hard to pull off. That said, because I am the co-founder of Argos, a commercial venture, I will maintain some separation between e-Literate, EEP, and Argos even as I try to keep all the plates spinning and bring these efforts together when doing so will further the mission.

    Relatedly, I won’t be announcing Argos posts here on e-Literate for much longer. I want to get back to writing posts here while maintaining an appropriate level of separation. My current plan is to stop announcing my Argos posts here at the end of July. So if you like what you’re reading over there, please subscribe to that blog.

    Read “Engagement and Faculty Workflows.”

  • New Post About the Blended Future of College on the Argos Blog

    New Post About the Blended Future of College on the Argos Blog

    As we try to make sense of changing student enrollment numbers post-COVID and think about what “quality education” means in a pervasively blended education, part of that work requires us to think about “data” the way we would think about our senses and sense-making in a face-to-face class. My new post on the Argos website describes one way the platform enables our educator/publishers to do that and provides some eye-opening early data about how well that strategy is working.

  • Argos: Making Good Course Design Easy and Fun

    Argos: Making Good Course Design Easy and Fun

    I’ve been building the Argos story slowly in this series for two reasons. First, we’re in something like a trough of disillusionment with courseware products. “Trough of disillusionment” is a term from the Gartner Hype Cycle about how innovations are viewed in the marketplace over time:

    I say “something like” the trough of disillusionment because the hype cycle is really about expectations rather than product/market fit. A new product comes out and we get excited because we’re told it will “change everything.” It doesn’t. We get disappointed. We decide we’ve been scammed. Over time, we figure out that, even though the new thing isn’t going to change everything, it’s useful for some things. Once we finally figure out what it’s good for, we talk about it less and use it more. Throughout the whole process, the thing itself often hasn’t changed. Oh, sometimes the start-ups decide pivot, or they die because they can’t outlast the trough. But Stanford-style MOOCs, for example, haven’t changed all that much since 2012. We just know what they’re good for now.

    I don’t think that’s what’s going on with courseware. It feels like a trough of disillusionment. In 2014, Campus Technology wrote about “The Great Adaptive Learning Experiment.” (One sign that the market is mixed up is that we can’t seem to settle on terminology. Are we talking about adaptive learning, personalized learning, or courseware? What’s the difference?) Since then, we’ve seen a handful of these “personalized learning” companies—e.g., Knewton, Acrobatiq, and Smart Sparrow—sold off for a low price and largely fade into the companies that bought them. CogBooks was the latest to be sold off to Cambridge University Press. While this may be a decent deal for CogBooks—the financials have not been disclosed—I doubt it will be read as a sign that this product category is changing the world. The big textbook publishers have done OK with courseware but not well enough to halt their continuing shrinkage as businesses.

    There’s a general sense of disappointment and malaise with the product category. I’m arguing that this is not a genuine trough of disillusionment but a failure of product/market fit. This is actually much more common in EdTech product categories. Think of retention early-warning analytics, ePortfolios, and learning object repositories, among many others. They all got hyped, disappointed the market, and then got stuck. The problem wasn’t that the market misunderstood the product but rather that the product makers misunderstood the market.

    My colleagues and I believe that the same thing has happened with courseware. The market has gotten stuck on an idea of the value that doesn’t actually appeal to the people who have to adopt and use it. There was some progress when publishers realized that students like low-stakes practice. Before EdTech, many students voluntarily created flashcards for themselves. When publishers realized that students were increasingly refusing to buy the expensive curricular products that their professors were prescribing, they became more “learner-centric,” by which they meant that they thought of students as the buyers. So they built in features that students would like. Low-stakes practice. That helped some. But then they got stuck again.

    Low-stakes practice could give instructors more information about how their students are doing. It could change the way those instructors teach. But so far, it mostly hasn’t. Which means that instructors don’t see value in prescribing courseware over alternative formats, like simple ebooks. The “market” for textbooks is both students who buy the product and instructors who prescribe it. Both use the product in some important sense. But on the instructor side, the paradigm has largely been stuck in the bound book format. It’s immutable. It’s a thing they adopt and then teach around.

    In contrast to the publishers, stand-alone course platform providers went in the complete opposite direction. They gave instructors a blank page. In their later stages before their acquisition, these vendors invariably—invariably—began developing or acquiring catalogs of titles so that instructors wouldn’t have to start from scratch. That tells us something about product/market fit. But the platform vendors also differed from the publishers in that they were selling their platforms first to institutions as enterprise software licenses. Those institutions then typically engaged in top-down efforts to get faculty to adopt the platform and develop content. In this conception, the product has three kinds of customers—the institution paying the license fee, the instructor adopting (or creating) the curricular product on the platform, and the students who are using (and possibly paying for) that curricular product.

    It doesn’t work.

    The joy and magic of product/market fit

    Way back in the first sentence of this post, I said there were two reasons why I’ve been building this story slowly. The second reason is that I take joy in writing this way. It’s a teacher thing. I want to make you care about things that you don’t think you care about. I want to make you spend time thinking about topics that you never thought you’d spend time on.

    You think you wouldn’t spend time reading a long piece on how fMRI machines work, the mathematics behind certain kinds of machine learning, and how these pieces come together in a methodological paper in cognitive psychology? You think there’s no way you would read a seven-thousand-word article on how Pearson is using HR policies to foster efficacy in its organization (which, by the way, was published on New Year’s Day)?

    Heh. Let’s put that to the test. I bet I can make you care. And I’ll spend days or even weeks researching and crafting a blog post to prove it.

    Again, it’s a teacher thing. I have an urge. I will go to irrational lengths to fulfill that urge. But not infinite lengths. If I had to write these blog posts using Dreamweaver in raw HTML, I never would have gotten started blogging. I needed WordPress to lower certain barriers for me so that the urge could take over. Remember “web 2.0”? This is web 2.0. When I started blogging, I never imagined I would still be doing it 16 years later, or that literally almost everyone who has access to the internet is creating and sharing personal content over some platform, whether it’s Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube…the list goes on and on.

    Great product design works that way. I have spent a lifetime failing to get myself to exercise regularly. No product and no subscription I tried could crack that nut. Until I bought an Apple Watch and subscribed to Apple Fitness+. Now I do 30-minute yoga sessions at least three times a week. In good weeks, I’ll add a couple of core workouts and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions.

    And then there’s the kayaking. I wrote a post on product/market fit that included a description of origami kayaks that my wife and I use. We had a canoe a while back but it was too heavy and too hard to get on and off the car. Now we go kayaking. And, interestingly, I received a handful of notes from people who read my post and decided to buy themselves the same kayaks.

    Oru Kayak

    I always wanted to exercise regularly. Logistical and psychological barriers prevented me from doing so. It would have been easy to conclude from a distance that people like me don’t want to exercise. I did hate exercising, but I wanted to exercise. I wanted to not hate it. My Apple Watch and Oru Kayak enabled me to find ways of exercising that I didn’t hate. As a result, my lifelong behavioral patterns changed pretty dramatically.

    One of the best examples for the story of courseware is Wikipedia. When it came out, most people thought it was nuts. The big thing in encyclopedias at the time was Microsoft Encarta, which was supposed to be a multimedia, interactive Encyclopedia Britannica killer. The idea that a bunch of randos on the internet would write a credible encyclopedia was literally a joke. Stephen Colbert encouraged his viewers to write absurd details into Wikipedia articles. Random people could never write a comprehensive encyclopedia with no formal coordination and no financial incentive. And even if they did, nobody would trust it.

    Until, in 2009, The New York Times ran the headline, “Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle with Wikipedia.”

    Today, when you search on Google the top-right corner of your results page will often have information summarized from and linked to Wikipedia. I don’t know about you, but I click on that link fairly often. And I generally don’t think about whether I can trust the article it takes me to. As I write this sentence, random people on the internet are fact-checking and updating articles on Wikipedia. I’m not one of them. I’m mostly just a consumer. Most of you probably are too. And that’s fine. It works.

    I started a Wikipedia page once because it was related to a particular EdTech topic that I was passionate about. I only wrote a couple of lines; it wasn’t much more than a stub for the topic. A bunch of other people each contributed a bit to the entry. I haven’t looked at it in years but others continued to contribute and update it This is the page today, complete with 148 footnotes. As I write this, the most recent update to the article was yesterday.

    We forget about Wikipedia because now we’re thinking about Facebook, which is designed to facilitate the opposite kind of behavior. Humans are malleable and adaptable. But you have to understand their drivers if you want to fulfill their needs, particularly if doing so entails a change in their behavior.

    My colleagues and I believe that the courseware product category is in a rut because the market has fundamentally misunderstood both how educators use curricular materials and how they would use them if only certain barriers were lowered for them.

    Upcycling curriculum

    In the first posts of this series, I wrote about how educators think about and use curricular materials in their course design. In this last section of this blog post, I’m going to start telling a story of how that can work using some mock-ups that we’re user testing. The goal here is to give some examples of how upcycling can work.

    Let’s say you’re selecting a textbook for your Chemistry for Non-Majors course. Your goal isn’t really to pick textbook. It’s to design your course. You go into the store that has all the products that run on Argos Education’s Sojourner platform. You have some good choices. You could pick Carnegie Mellon OLI’s General Chemistry course, which has a mastery learning approach and has been carefully engineered for efficacy. You could teach with ASU Inspark Network’s Critical Chemistry, a heavily experiential learning-based product for non-majors that is thematically organized around how chemistry is used to save lives. But in your case, your college puts a strong emphasis on affordability. That’s a major priority. So you search the catalog particularly for inexpensive options:

    You’re still focused on getting through the curricular materials selection process so you can get to the course design process. You review the options and pick your title.

    Now you have a choice. Are you working on your own? Are you leading a departmental adoption process? Maybe working with a learning designer or an OPM to create an online course? Maybe you want collaborators involved:

    You have options based on your use case. And not everybody gets to edit. For example, maybe as a department, you want to have all instructors be able to see what you’re working on, some who are able to comment, and just a couple who are able to actually make changes. On the other hand, if you’re just making the selection yourself, you can skip over all this. Or you can invite your institution’s faculty support person or a colleague in to give you some suggestions.

    But you’re still in adoption mode. You’re getting to know the text so that you can design your course. You’ve picked an unmodified OpenStax title, so it’s going to start off looking a lot like the free PDF version:

    Notice the little notes on the right-hand side. We’ve applied a little machine learning and a little learning design research to make the pedagogical structure of the text more visible to you. If you mouse over the little item, you can see more detail:

    Ah. This is interesting. You get this. It’s a bit like how you think about putting together your lectures. Maybe you want to switch to outline mode so you can see the overall structure of how this thing is put together:

    You’ve collapsed the text so that you can focus more on those little post-it notes and see the structure. It’s pretty much like a lecture. (It’s labeled “directive instruction” for a reason.) You introduce the concept to help students understand why the topic is important to the course, you provide them with some information, maybe you work a problem out for them—if you were doing this in class, you might work that problem out on a whiteboard—you…

    Oh. Hmm. Usually you wrap up the lecture with a summary. This text doesn’t do that. You could fix that, but honestly, you’re not too worried about it.

    The OpenStax text also doesn’t give an end-of-chapter test at the end. The truth is that you’d want to pull together some questions from a test bank anyway. So you’ll worry about that later too.

    You dive back into Design mode to review the text. You want to give it a close reading now as you think through the design of your classes. And you find another unpleasant discovery. The section on acid-base reactions is just not right for your class. The language is a bit garbled and probably unnecessarily complex for your students.

    This is the point when you would normally write the following in your syllabus:

    When you get to Section 7.2.2 on acid-base reactions, do not read it. Instead, please go to this folder in Canvas and read the document called “Acid-Base Reactions.” Follow the link at the bottom of the page and take the quiz there. Then read the rest of Section 7.”

    Which is not ideal for anyone. For you, you’re writing documents and organizing folders and diving into LMS quizzing tools and then trying to knit together what the students are doing in the LMS with what they’re doing in the courseware. For the students, they’re jumping through hoops.

    But instructors do it all the time. Locking down the courseware might create enough friction that they will do it less often than they might otherwise. But many of them will do it. It’s a bad experience for everyone. And there’s no way for anyone to tell if the net result is better or worse for the student because the activity is happening in different systems that don’t really talk to each other. But as a dedicated instructor, you will do it if you think it will help the students.

    Or, if you’re in a platform that allows you to edit the curricular materials, you could just do this:

    This is better for everyone. Students don’t have to jump through hoops. Instructors spend much less time setting up the content. And now that all the information is in one system, it’s possible to track whether these changes actually help students. That last piece is another topic for another blog post, but it’s incredibly important. If we want to create a virtuous cycle, we want to share changes, test which ones improve learning in which contexts, and generally create positive evolutionary pressure.

    Finding teachable moments in the course design process

    This idea of pulling editing “inside the tent” is central to understanding product/market fit and the levers available to change behaviors. As an instructor, you are mostly not trying write or rewrite textbooks. That’s not you think about what you’re doing, in part because the textbook is the raw material for their course design. It’s not a thing you care about in and of itself.

    We want to catch you in those moments when you’re thinking about their course design and pull you into a kind of dialog as you use the raw materials to build that course.

    And we’re always making choices about what we want to ask you to think about and what we want to get out of your way. If you want to add a virtual lab, maybe we give you the option of some scaffolding to help you think through all the steps you want students to go through:

    When you pick their actual virtual lab, maybe we don’t bother you by calling attention to the learning objectives but we do show you a selection of labs that are tagged with the learning objectives associated with the content section you are working on:

    When you choose the lab, we let you see the cost change and, if you have set a cost cap, we warn you when you go over. We even give you a breakdown of what you’re asking the students to pay for:

    We don’t always want to hide learning objectives from you. Rather, we pick the moment when learning objectives are most useful to think about, like when you’re picking out assessment questions:

    Notice that the platform introducing a bit of implicit community here. Other instructors are also designing courses around the same curricular product that you are. Maybe they have some good ideas that they’re willing to share.

    And the real value of the sharing is not just the content but the rationale behind the course design. Why did the author write a particular answer in a particular way?

    I could go on, but hopefully the theme is clear.

    Professionally designed courseware has a lot of useful information either explicitly or implicitly built into it. We hide that design information from the instructors and then lock the product down. In doing so, we turn it into a static artifact that they have to work around. However the publisher might conceive of the product’s value is irrelevant if instructors are using it as raw materials for their course designs.

    But if you start from that assumption, let them do what they’re going to do anyway in an environment where you can scaffold, collaborate, and provide feedback on the results of their designs, you can engage them in a much deeper way while saving them time and giving them more control over the things they care about. Also, we no longer have to separate conversations about course design from conversations about effective teaching practices. The fact that we do so now is a strong indicator that something is broken in our ecosystem. Course design and in-the-moment teaching are a continuous cycle. The two are constantly in dialog with each other. That’s the way teachers actually teach in the real world. Lesson plans change. You adjust. You improvise. Much of this is not arbitrary but rather driven by your encounters with your students.

    If we want courseware to grow in adoption and educational impact (and perhaps as a useful and self-sustaining industry), we have to get away from the book. That doesn’t just mean getting away from linear, non-interactive designs. More importantly, it means getting away from the textbook as a static artifact that educators teach around.

    By the way, today’s Blursday Social (9/16 at 4 PM ET) will be a chat about Argos. So you can come to that if you’re curious. Sign up here.

  • Chegg vs. Pearson: Are back-of-chapter answers intellectual property?

    Chegg vs. Pearson: Are back-of-chapter answers intellectual property?

    We interrupt our regularly scheduled post series on Argos Education for this breaking news…

    No, I’m not talking about the news that Blackboard was acquired by some ERPish rollup creation of a private equity company. I searched my soul to examine my deepest thoughts and feelings on that topic. Here’s what I came up with:

    • I’m happy that Bill Ballhaus finally got paroled. While he and I clashed once or twice, he seems like basically a nice guy. He didn’t deserve to be stuck trying to unload that company for five years.
    • I’m both happy and worried for the nice people who work at Blackboard. I hope this means that most of them will still have jobs.
    • I have similar feelings about Blackboard customers. I hope this works out for them.
    • I am deeply grateful that Phil Hill exists so that I don’t have to spend my time trying to make sense of this deal.

    That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. My therapist tells me this is good progress in recovering from the formative trauma that turned me into the blogger that I am today.

    No, I’m talking about Pearson suing Chegg for copyright infringement because Chegg has reconstructed Pearson’s back-of-chapter homework answers:

    Specifically, the suit revolves around Chegg Study, a subscription service that among its offerings features answers to end-of-chapter homework questions from various texts for $14.95 a month, with the textbook questions often copied nearly verbatim or with just slight changes, the suit alleges. Pearson lawyers told the court that “the majority” of Chegg’s roughly $644 million in total revenue in 2020 came from its sales of answers through Chegg Study, which reportedly counted some 6.6 million subscribers as of 2020.

    Pearson Education Sues Chegg, Alleging ‘Massive’ Copyright Infringement

    You may recall my post responding to the Forbes article about them, which was entitled “This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid.” The main piece of new information I added was that most of the large publishers themselves had licensed these answers to Chegg a while back. Those contracts have expired. And now we have at least a hint of how much Pearson thinks their contract with Chegg may have cost them. While the numbers here don’t translate directly into Pearson losses, they do give us an order-of-magnitude sense of the amount of business here.

    More immediately interesting to me, though, is this paragraph from the complaint:

    As part of Pearson’s focus on pedagogy, Pearson and its authors devote
    significant creative effort to develop effective, imaginative, and engaging questions to include in the textbooks it publishes. Pearson’s end-of-chapter questions are strategically designed and carefully calibrated to reinforce key concepts taught in the textbooks, test students’ comprehension of these issues, enhance students’ problem-solving skills, and, ultimately, improve students’ understanding of the subject matter. Pearson’s textbooks can contain hundreds or thousands of end-of-chapter questions. These end-of-chapter questions form core components of the teaching materials contained in Pearson textbooks and are frequently hallmarks of Pearson titles. As such, the availability, quality, and utility of these questions are often important considerations when educators select which textbooks to adopt for their courses.

    Pearson v. Chegg complaint

    While the lawsuit doesn’t interest me, the core issue about the value of assessment question construction does. At first blush, it’s tempting to think that the answer to “Solve for x: x2 + 3x +9 = 0″ could not possibly be intellectual property. But, as Pearson’s complaint states further down,

    One of the points of my original post was that companies like Chegg exist in part because instructor grading policies put students in a position between wanting to learn and needing to pass. While that tension is unavoidable in some cases, it is largely avoidable in many cases. We simply haven’t taught instructors about productive ways to grade formative assessments (or even what formative assessments are).

    But the lawsuit brings up a separate and equally important angle. When we step back from the deforming effect of grading and simply look at the assessments themselves, we see teaching craft. Both the construction and the order of well-written questions are designed to probe the finer points of students’ understanding. And in some cases, it teaches those finer points. When students are asked to solve a problem that has one new twist from the previous one, sometimes they learn just by figuring out that twist in the moment.

    Pearson is arguing in their complaint that substantial teaching craft is built into their question construction. It has a financial value to the company because it’s part of the value proposition of their product. Setting aside the legal question of whether recreating homework answers constitutes copyright infringement under current US law, I agree with Pearson about the value. I also think that the publishers should not have a de facto monopoly on the craft that creates that value.

    Sometimes the questions don’t work as intended. It could be a flaw in the question construction, like an obvious correct answer or, conversely, confusing wording that trips up some students who understand the concept, causing them to give an answer that is considered “incorrect.” Or the sequencing could be off. If the order of questions can be carefully crafted for pedagogical reasons, then anti-cheating functions like question randomization or algorithmically generated questions can take away that tool. And sometimes the question may be written in a way that requires cultural or other context that not all students have in order to understand them. (IQ and other standardized tests were particularly notorious for their cultural biases in their early decades.)

    For a variety of reasons, good educators will tweak and invent assessment questions to fit the needs of the students in front of them. And yet, how many assessment EdTech tools can you think of that do a good job of helping instructors learn and share craft in this regard? It’s quite easy to break a good, psychometrically validated assessment design unintentionally by adding problems that are easier or harder than the instructor thinks they are, for example. On an even more basic level, nobody ever taught me how to write a good distractor or even what that term meant. I had to pick that craft up on my own, first by instinct and later by reading and by asking experts. (I am lucky enough to have had access to such experts.)

    There has to be a balance. On one hand, instructors should be taught how to recognize and analyze the embodied craft of the assessment questions that they use as part of a curricular product. On the other hand, we should not assume that those assessments are perfectly designed or even that there is any such thing as a single perfectly designed assessment for all teaching contexts in which a curricular product may be used.

    Instructors will very often use a mix of pre-made assessment questions and their own. And if they don’t have one tool that lets them do both, then they will mix bits of assessments from different tools with very little way to integrate the information usefully. No product I know of is currently doing a good job of helping instructors think through how to mix and match well. Even dedicated publisher homework platforms like Pearson Mastering or MHE ALEKS, which are theoretically intended for supporting exactly this use case, struggle to strike a balance between the features where the platform is making design- and data-driven decisions and the features where the instructors can insert their own problems. Product designers tend to think of the former as their real mission and the latter as something they have to accommodate because some instructors demand a measure of control.

    This is a market failure. Some of the consequences are as follows:

    • Instructors don’t make full and appropriate use of advanced curricular products.
    • Instructors often have no way, either functionally in the product or intellectually with the skills they have been taught, to appropriately modify a crafted assessment to make it better rather than worse.
    • There are not tools that enable instructors to look across their entire collection of assessments and easily evaluate how the pieces are working together.
    • There are no clear and easy means for instructors to collaborate with the designers of their curricular products, other adopters of the product who are master teachers, or even their campus faculty support staff, to help them upcycle the curricular product into a course design that is as good as or better than what they’re starting with.

    One way to look at copyrighted material is as embodied craft. We have gotten hung up on the idea that the particular embodiment is the locus of educational value. Hence, the lawsuit. Instead, we should really be working on how we can enable and encourage career educators to become expert practitioners and empower them with tools that enable them to practice their craft with more skill and precision. While they shouldn’t have to craft everything from scratch, neither should they be forced to live in a world where there’s a hard and opaque wall between the course design components that they are upcycling and the ones that they are crafting themselves.

  • Argos: Upcycling Course Design

    In my first post in this series, I wrote about what good teaching is. While the argument was wrapped in a lot of autobiography, it makes a number of assertions that are foundational to the mission of Argos:

    • The best evidence we have suggests that teachers change lives, by I we mean that students who have had good teachers will make more money, be physically and mentally healthier, and have more fulfilling relationships over the entire course of their lives.
    • Good teaching combines the emotional and the intellectual. In particular, teaching the diverse group of students that can be found in almost any classroom effectively requires diagnostic skill and creativity.
    • The intellectual aspect of good teaching is largely invisible to our society, including even many proponents and practitioners of education. The average person may sense it from time to time but, as a rule, we don’t talk about how it works and don’t think about it as an aquired skill set (nevermind a discipline that evolves over time).
    • As a result, there are social barriers to educators sharing craft with each other on top of the barriers created by the employment conditions in higher education.

    One result is a poor understanding of the textbook’s role and product/market fit. In turn, this has contributed to several decades of slow, painful, and often unproductive efforts to creating a vision for a digitally transformed version of the product. We can’t see what we can’t see. As Henry Ford put it, “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”

    The primary purpose a textbook serves is to enable an instructor to upcycle the author’s course design. They adopt and adapt that design to fit their local needs and context rather than spending enormous amounts of time writing all the course elements from scratch. In the Industrial Age, where editing, typesetting, printing, distributing, and selling paper books were all labor-intensive and specialized tasks, it made sense to have one author, one editor, and one distributor to produce an artifact that each instructor would then independently upcycle. In the digital world, we can continuously upcycle course design by crowdsourcing improvement, both directly through collaboration and indirectly through shared data.

    That’s an essential part of what Argos Education does. We enable a virtuous cycle where educators can continuously upcycle their course designs with their peers. This enables them to teach more effectively with less work. It also creates a positive evolutionary pressure on their course design and delivery. While educators are still free to exercise their judgment in their respective classrooms, they will do so knowing how their peers are upcycling the same basic course design as well as how well various aspects of the course design are working based on analytics. In other words, they will have peer and expert feedback and suggestions that they don’t have now.

    How paper textbooks work

    What is an educator doing when she selects a textbook? What is she looking for? What are her criteria? On a micro level, then answers vary dramatically from one educator to the next. One is looking for good back-of-chapter questions. Another is looking for readings that will be engaging and accessible to her students. Or a particular angle on the curriculum. Or a particular teaching method.

    On a macro level, all of these fall into the larger bucket of looking for pieces of course design to upcycle. The specifics of what professors look for can be heavily inflected by a variety of factors. For highly procedural subjects like math, many educators will focus on the progression of scaffolded and unscaffolded problems. In economics, it could be philosophical/political. Conservative economists may like Greg Mankiw’s explanation of inflation while progressive economists may prefer Paul Krugman’s. A biology professor may choose a text that emphasizes an ecological lens to the topic over a microbiological one for several reasons. Maybe her university is known for its environmental studies programs but not for its pre-med programs. Or maybe she herself feels better equipped to teach the subject well from one angle rather than the other.

    These differences can be neutral with respect to some imagined ideal of an “effective” class. How much does it really matter if a first-year biology student learns a little more ecology and a little less microbiology? Or the other way around? In those early courses, we mainly want to help the students develop their interest in the subject, some general knowledge, and some discipline-related thinking skills.

    But in context, the differences can be dramatic. Teaching biology 101 from a microbiology perspective to a student who is trying to decide whether she wants to pursue a major in environmental studies may cause her to drop the course or even her major. Likewise, having a professor teach the course from an angle that they’re not comfortable with is likely to lead to a disengaged, paint-by-numbers teaching approach. If the educator is bored or uncomfortable, then the students will likely be bored or uncomfortable too.

    Educators look for textbooks that give them more materials that they can upcycle into their course designs. The more the materials fit the course design in the teacher’s head, the more that teacher can focus on adding value in her context rather than filling in holes in the base course materials. And make no mistake: Educators almost always customize, even if they don’t think about what they’re doing in those terms.

    When I taught a variety of subjects to middle school students, the one I was least opinionated about was pre-algebra. The book I had been given was pretty good and I didn’t feel terribly confident in my ability to come up with better teaching approaches to that subject. So I taught the book, chapter by chapter. I didn’t write a lot of supplemental materials or skip around. But I improvised all the time. For example, at that age, some students acquire abstract thinking later than others. This makes teaching concepts like negative numbers difficult. The book I was using talked about number lines but those were still too abstract. So I took the kids out onto the streets of Hoboken and we turned one of them into a number line that the students could walk. Later, when we were graphing lines, we turned it into a two-dimensional graph. (I was lucky that Hoboken streets had a grid layout.)

    I created lessons that weren’t in the book so that the course design would fit the real needs of my actual students. I didn’t do it for pleasure or out of a sense that I was a better mathematician than the textbook author or even that I was a better curriculum designer in the global sense. But I knew better what my students needed from me because I knew my particular students’ needs and my own capabilities better. So I upcycled the course design. I took a found object that didn’t quite fit the purpose and turned it into something that did.

    Credit: Surfer Today

    Even though I was more opinionated about how to teach science, I found a textbook that I really liked and followed that fairly closely too. But when a student asked a question that was provoked by but not answered by the experiment in the book, what was I supposed to do? Ignore it? Tell the student to go read about it?

    No. I wanted to visibly reward genuine scientific curiosity in front of the class. So we made up experiments together to answer her question.

    I didn’t think of it as either following or not following the textbook. I didn’t care about the textbook one way or the other. The textbook was just a tool for producing a better course design with less work. I cared about helping my students learn what they needed to learn in the ways that they needed to learn it, some of which the textbook’s author could anticipate and some of which he could not. (It was a male author.)

    Sometimes—often, if we’re being honest—educators are not lucky enough to find a book that fits their contextual needs perfectly. For example, some of my students had never been out of a city. Taking them to the zoo helped stimulate some of them, but a zoo is not the same as a natural habitat. And even if I had VR and could take them out to the African savannah or an alien planet virtually, it still would have been an abstract concept to them. The best way to hook a lot of them was to create a transect in the park directly across the street from the school. I showed them how the space where they hung out and kicked a ball around was absolutely teeming with life that they never noticed. Suddenly, ecology was real to them. It was salient. At that point, the information in textbook would become much more meaningful to them.

    The book I had adopted had some ideas about creating transects but I had to improvise a lot and fill in gaps where the text failed to address urban ecologies. I ended up creating a fair bit of original curriculum. Again, that had not been my intention. I didn’t even think about it as altering the course design. I was just trying to fill in holes for my students. It was often an improvisational act.

    College is no different. First-generation students at Georgia State University are just as likely to have never seen the countryside as my Hoboken middle schoolers. In every course at every school, we have to adjust to the people who are in front of us using the skills that we have. There is no chance that we can “instructor-proof” courses with “personalized learning” any time in the foreseeable future, even if that were a desirable outcome.

    We have fetishized the artifact of the textbook without really understanding how it is used by an expert practitioner (partly because we don’t think of educators as expert practitioners). We have constructed a fantasy of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer as the apotheosis of the textbook when textbooks have never functioned that way.

    Biologists don’t select “Pearson Biology.” The top-selling biology textbook sold by Pearson is named after the biologist who authored it—Neil Allison Campbell. Educators who adopt Campbell Biology do so, in part, because they like Campbell’s course design, freeze-dried into textbook format. They upcycle the materials for their own classes. They attribute that course design to a presumed colleague, even if he’s one they haven’t met: noted biologist and biology educator Neil Allison Campbell. Pearson actively maintains that fiction even though Campbell has been dead for sixteen years and three editions have been published since his death. So baked into the very heart of today’s textbook branding system is a sense of collegial sharing that is increasingly a facade created by the publishers.

    Two-cycle upcycling

    Sometimes academic departments select textbooks as a group. And they do so as part of designing the curriculum for their entry-level courses. In this case, the department is upcycling the course design collaboratively—or, at least, the tenured and tenure-track professors are—and then that design on to the individual educators. Who inevitably upcycle it themselves from time to time. Even if they color inside the lines, there are always things that come up with the students that the course design didn’t anticipate. And many educators take liberties with the course designs they are given.

    In an ideal world, educators within a department would meet regularly to share their upcycling and improve on the core course design template. But they generally don’t because they don’t have the time and because these upcycling changes aren’t easy to share. Sometimes they happen in class, either planned or unplanned. Sometimes they happen in the LMS, or in individual tools connected to the LMS. The departmental course adoption process demonstrates the need and desire for collaborative, multi-cycle course design upcycling. But it’s too hard and too time-consuming. As a result, all that extra work that educators put in to improve their course designs, and that could contribute to a collegial upcycling conversation, are lost.

    EdTech has made upcycling harder

    You would think that having everything in digital would make upcycling easier. At the moment, the opposite is true. Suppose, for example, that you decide to adopt the latest edition of Campbell Biology. You have a couple of choices. Your students could use the eText or a textbook. The eText is no more editable than the textbook. You could also augment by adopting the bundle of the eText and Mastering. So you’ll have to tell students, “First, read this section in your eText. Then follow this link to the homework platform. After that, come back to the LMS.” Is that easier than it was to accomplish the same tasks in a physical classroom? Is it easier for the instructor to set up and customize? Or easier for the students to follow along? I think not. It is easier to grade the homework. And it’s super easy for students to Google the answers to those homework problems.

    Now suppose you don’t think a section of the textbook is appropriate for your students. Maybe it’s too hard for the mix of students you have, for example,

    Read sections 7 to 7.2.2 in your eText. Do not read section 7.2.3. Instead, follow this link to the LMS folder called “Chapter 7” and read the document called ‘Alternate 7.2.3.’ Then, follow the link at the bottom of the document and take the quiz in the LMS. After that, go back to your eText and read 7.2.4 through to the end of the chapter.

    Easy, right? While we’re at it, let’s throw in a virtual lab and a discussion in the special, non-LMS forum tool that you like. Upcycling in this environment is incredibly hard. Sharing your upcycling for somebody else to use—or even just migrating it from one LMS to another—is way too hard and time-consuming to expect full-time educators to do.

    Attempts to address this problem have largely failed. OER creates a licensing structure that is supposed to facilitate upcycling. But upcycling requires infrastructure as well as a license. Just because you can theoretically edit that OER-licensed PDF doesn’t make it any easier to upcycle in reality.

    On the technical side, Learning Object Repositories (LORs) designed by technologists for large organizations fail because the product category takes the wrong approach. The whole idea of a “re-usable learning object” is built on the analogy to re-usable software objects. But software and content aren’t re-usable in the same way. Educational content is all about context. You can’t chop up a bunch of courses on the same topics, paste pieces together, and have them make sense to learners. Creating modular, ready-to-reuse content (as opposed to upcyclable content) is incredibly hard. Often impossible. So LOR creators often spend tremendous amounts of time creating elaborate content taxonomies, only to discover that most people are using their fancy systems as media libraries and quiz question banks.

    I’m not suggesting that either open licenses or LORs are useless. They just don’t solve the whole problem of continuous upcycling.

    Continuous upcycling is possible

    What if we could dramatically lower the barrier for continuous, collaborative, data-informed upcycling of course designs? Catch that teacher at the moment of improvisational need and make a good suggestion? Share brilliant teaching ideas that often never leave the classroom of the person who created them? Nudge teachers who are in a bit of a rut to show them some exciting things their colleagues are doing? All while keeping them focused on their core teaching challenges?

    What if every educator who adopts a “textbook” could join one or more communities of adopters? What if they could edit, delete, and insert new content into the product they were upcycling? What if they could choose to share those edits with their department, their learning designer, the original author of the curricular product, or the whole community of educators who are adopting it? What if the product could recommend changes that colleagues are making, particularly if those changes seemed connected to better learning outcomes? What if educators could selectively adopt those changes? And what if they could choose to have conversations with their colleagues about the design, how they’re changing it, why, and how they could tell if it works?

    This is how Argos Education aspires to change the fundamental value proposition of the “textbook,” or “courseware,” or whatever awful name you want to invent for that freeze-dried course design that educators upcycle to meet their local needs.

    In my next post in this series, I’ll talk concretely about how this ecosystem—and economy—works.

    In the meantime, this week’s Blursday Social will be a chat about Argos. So you can come to that if you’re curious. Sign up here.