e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims

    Update 5/17/16: I made a mistake in my math on the UW Milwaukee improvements. The number of A’s and B’s increased 163% increased 220% for “unprepared” students and 170% for “prepared” students. I apologize for the error.

    Update 7/23: Read this blog post for D2L admission of mistakes and changes to claims.

    At this point I’d say that we have established a pattern of behavior.

    Michael and I have been quite critical of D2L and their pattern of marketing behavior that is misleading and harmful to the ed tech community. Michael put it best:

    I can’t remember the last time I read one of D2L’s announcements without rolling my eyes. I used to have respect for the company, but now I have to make a conscious effort not to dismiss any of their pronouncements out-of-hand. Not because I think it’s impossible that they might be doing good work, but because they force me to dive into a mountain of horseshit in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold at the bottom. Every. Single. Time. I’m not sure how much of the problem is that they have decided that they need to be disingenuous because they are under threat from Instructure or under pressure from investors and how much of it is that they are genuinely deluding themselves. Sadly, there have been some signs that at least part of the problem is the latter situation, which is a lot harder to fix. But there is also a fundamental dishonesty in the way that these statistics have been presented.

    Well, here’s the latest. John Baker put out a blog called This Isn’t Your Dad’s Distance Learning Program with this theme: (more…)

  • U of Phoenix: Losing hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptive-learning LMS bet

    It would be interesting to read (or write) a post mortem on this project some day.

    Two and a half years ago I wrote a post describing the University of Phoenix investment of a billion dollars on new IT infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a new, adaptive-learning LMS. In another post I described a ridiculous patent awarded to Apollo Group, parent company of U of Phoenix, that claimed ownership of adaptive activity streams. Beyond the patent, Apollo Group also purchased Carnegie Learning for $75 million as part of this effort.

    And that’s all going away, as described by this morning’s Chronicle article on the company planning to go down to just 150,000 students (from a high of 460,000 several years ago). (more…)

  • Google Classroom Addresses Major Barrier To Deeper Higher Ed Adoption

    A year ago I wrote about Google Classroom, speculating whether it would affect the institutional LMS market in higher education. My initial conclusion:

    I am not one to look at Google’s moves as the end of the LMS or a complete shift in the market (at least in the short term), but I do think Classroom is significant and worth watching. I suspect this will have a bigger impact on individual faculty adoption in higher ed or as a secondary LMS than it will on official institutional adoption, at least for the next 2 – 3 years.

    And my explanation [emphasis added]:

    But these features are targeted at innovators and early adopter instructors who are willing to fill in the gaps themselves.

    1. The course creation, including setting up of rosters, is easy for an instructor to do manually, but it is manual. There has been no discussion that I can find showing that the system can automatically create a course, including roster, and update over the add / drop period.

    (more…)

  • 68% of Statistics Are Meaningless, D2L Edition

    Two years ago, I wrote about how D2L’s analytics package looked serious and potentially ground-breaking, but that there were serious architectural issues with the underlying platform that were preventing the product from working properly for customers. Since then, we’ve been looking for signs that the company has dealt with these issues and is ready to deliver something interesting and powerful. And what we’ve seen is…uh…

    …uh…

    Well, the silence has ended. I didn’t get to go to FUSION this year, but I did look at the highlights of the analytics announcements, and they were…

    …they were…

    OK, I’ll be honest. They were incredibly disappointing in almost every way possible, and good examples of a really bad pattern of hype and misdirection that we’ve been seeing from D2L lately.

    (more…)

  • About The D2L Claim Of BrightSpace LeaP And Academic Improvements

    Recently I wrote a post checking up on a claim by D2L that seems to imply that their learning platform leads to measurable improvements in academic performance. The genesis of this thread is a panel discussion at the IMS Global conference where I argued that LMS usage in aggregate has not improved academic performance but is important, or even necessary, infrastructure with a critical role. Unfortunately, I found that D2L’s claim from Lone Star was misleading:

    That’s right – D2L is taking a program where there is no evidence that LMS usage was a primary intervention and using the results to market and strongly suggest that using their LMS can “help schools go beyond simply managing learning to actually improving it”. There is no evidence presented[2] of D2L’s LMS being “foundational” – it happened to be the LMS during the pilot that centered on ECPS usage.

    Subsequently I found a press release at D2L with a claim that appeared to be more rigorous and credible (written in an awful protected web page that prevents select – copy – paste).

    D2L Launches the Next Generation of BrightSpace and Strives to Accelerate the Nation’s Path to 60% Attainment

    D2L, the EdTech company that created Brightspace, today announces the next generation of its learning platform, designed to develop smarter learners and increase graduation rates. By featuring a new faculty user interface (UI) and bringing adaptive learning to the masses, Brightspace is more flexible, smarter, and easier to use. [snip] (more…)

  • An Example Why LMS Should Not Be Only Part of Learning Ecosystem

    In Michael’s initial post on the Post-LMS, he built on this central theme:

    Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind.

    The idea here is not that the traditional LMS has no value (it can be critical infrastructure, particularly for mainstream faculty adoption), but rather that in the future we both see more learning platform designs being tied to specific pedagogies. This idea is quite relevant given the ongoing LMS users’ conferences (InstructureCon last week, D2L Fusion this week, BbWorld next month, Apereo / Sakai as well as iMoot in the past two months).

    Later in the post Michael mentions ASU’s Habitable Worlds as an example of assessing the quality of students’ participation instead of direct grading. (more…)

  • The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One’s Own

    I have been meaning for some time to get around to blogging about the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) paper on a Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) and Tony Bates’ thoughtful response to it. The core concepts behind the NGDLE are that a next-generation digital learning environment should have the following characteristics:

    • Interoperability and Integration
    • Personalization
    • Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
    • Collaboration
    • Accessibility and Universal Design

    The paper also suggests that the system should be modular. They draw heavily on an analogy to LEGOs and make a call for more robust standards. In response, Bates raises three concerns:

    1. He is suspicious of a potentially heavy and bureaucratic standards-making process that is vulnerable to undue corporate influence.
    2. He worries that LEGO is a poor metaphor that suggests an industrialized model.
    3. He is concerned that, taken together, the ELI requirements for an NGDLE will push us further in the direction of computer-driven rather than human-driven classes.

    As it happens, ELI’s vision for NGDLE bears a significant resemblance to a vision that some colleagues and I came up with ten years ago when we were trying to help the SUNY system find an LMS that would fit the needs of all 64 campuses, ((I understand that SUNY has since added a 65th campus)) ranging from small, rural community colleges to R1 universities to medical and ophthalmology schools to a school of fashion. We got pretty deep into thinking about the implementation details, so it’s been on my mind to write my own personal perspective on the answers to Tony’s questions, based in large part on that previous experience. In the meantime, Jim Groom, who has made a transition from working at a university to working full-time at Reclaim Hosting, has written a series of really provocative and, to me, exciting posts on the future of the digital learning environment from his own perspective. Jim shares the starting assumption of the ELI and SUNY that a learning environment should be “learner-centric,” but he has a much more fully developed (and more radical) idea of what that really means, based on his previous work with A Domain of One’s Own. He also, in contrast to the ELI and SUNY teams, does not start from the assumption that “next-generation” means evolving the LMS. Rather, the questions he seems to be asking are “What is minimum amount of technical infrastructure required to create a rich digital learning environment?” and “Of that minimal amount of infrastructure we need, what is the minimal amount that needs to be owned by the institution rather than the learner?” I see these trains of thought emerging his posts on a university API, a personal API, and a syndication bus. What’s exciting to me about these posts is that, even though Jim is starting from a very different set of assumptions, he is also converging on something like the vision we had for SUNY.

    In this post, I’m going to try to respond to both Tony and Jim. One of the challenges of this sort of conversation is that the relationship between the technical architecture and the possibilities it creates for the learners is complex. It’s easy to oversimplify or even conflate the two if we’re not very careful. So one of the things that I’m going to try to do here is untangle the technical talk from the functional talk.

    (more…)