e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • No, really, courseware is a thing now

    In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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  • SJSU and Udacity: The Obvious Problems and Value of Report

    SJSU has announced via an official blog post that they are studying the results of the SJSU Plus program using Udacity.

    First, news coverage and much commentary have been based on very preliminary and unanalyzed data from a spring 2013 pilot of three SJSU Plus courses with Udacity. We are currently awaiting a more comprehensive National Science Foundation data analysis and report that will be available in August (spring semester courses ended and final grades were submitted only seven weeks ago). We look forward to discussing these results next month.

    I mentioned in my post last night that I believe this is a good move.

    How often do we get the chance to review the results of traditional college courses and see institutions publicly study the learning outcomes in order to improve the course effectiveness? This open review is one innovation from the SJSU Plus program that should be extended to other courses.

    There are plenty of people who do not share my optimism of the reporting process, partially due to the expectation that we already know most of the lessons learned and there should be no real surprise. Indeed, if you read the news coverage of SJSU pausing the Udacity program, there are several findings that are already fairly obvious.

    Findings to Date

    The following summary is based on several articles and blogs directly based on first-hand experience.

    Finding 1) The program was rushed, and the courses were still being developed while students started the courses:

    IHE: But, because of the haste, faculty were building the courses on the fly. Not only was this a “recipe for insanity,” Junn said, but faculty did not have a lot of time to watch how students were doing in the courses because the faculty were busy trying to finish them. It took about 400 hours to build a course, though the courses are designed to be reused.

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  • SJSU and Udacity: Poor Planning and Support, but Valuable Reviewing of Results

    A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed for an article in the NY Times about recent pushback against MOOCs.

    Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has written critically about MOOCs, said their spread is likely to lead to a three-tiered world, with a few high-status “super professors” for whom the courses provide both status and royalties; a larger pool of tenured professors who continue to teach their regular in-person classes until they retire; and “a huge army of adjuncts and teaching assistants,” whose jobs will be vulnerable to online competition.

    “The problem with this MOOC-as-labor-issue argument is that it has no place for students and learning,” said Phil Hill, an education technology consultant. “Our starting point ought to be what students need and whether this is an effective form of learning.”

    Perhaps to the dismay of Jonathan’s Aunt Nancy, my comments were positioned as refuting his comments. In the context of the NY Times article, that positioning was accurate; however, in Jonathan’s follow-up blog post, he misinterprets my meaning.

    MOOCification is about power too. If people with access to power want to convince recalcitrant professors to accept MOOCs, arguing that they must be because this must be is a terrible idea. Yet this is precisely what the two quotes following mine in that New York Times article from last week try to do. [snip]

    Whenever Phil makes that infuriating argument, I usually respond with some variation of “profs gotta eat.” Not surprisingly that argument works really well on other profs, but not so well on Phil. However, I want to point out to Phil’s clients that they can’t just wish the class divide away. Since profs gotta eat, they’re going to worry about eating whether you tell them they’re allowed to or not. Moreover, plenty of us believe that by looking out for our interests we are looking out for students and learning. Therefore, making this kind of argument simply serves as a way to shut down all discussion of the subject, which will only breed resentment. [emphasis added]

    While I enjoy reading Jonathan’s blog and appreciate his real concern with student learning and the profession of teaching, he is incorrect in his assertion that I want to “convince recalcitrant professors to accept MOOCs” or that I don’t believe that “by looking out for [professors] interests we are looking out for students and learning”. I am not making “this kind of argument”.

    Focus on Students and Learning First

    What I meant to say is, ironically, what I said: “Our starting point ought to be what students need and whether [MOOC] is an effective form of learning”. The lens of MOOC-as-labor-issue tends to create an us-versus-them, you’re either pro-MOOC or anti-MOOC, mentality that leads to, well, nowhere except arguments. The lens of MOOC-as-teaching-method to be explored should lead us to critically look at learning outcomes and exploration of how to apply or refine the teaching method.

    Michael made this same point in a more elegant fashion in his commentary on the SJSU Philosophy Department rejection of edX:

    Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community.

    SJSU Plus and Udacity

    And this is where the story comes to San Jose State University and the recent announcement that they were “pausing” the Udacity MOOC-for-credit pilot program (SJSU Plus), as described at Inside Higher Education:

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  • MOOCs: The Courage to Say No

     

    University of Hull
    University of Hull

    Silicon Valley has enthusiastically promoted MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), but some universities have decided MOOCs are not effective or appropriate for their students.

    In the summer of 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported 160,000 students signed up for Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course. The course was available as a lecture for enrolled students on the Stanford University campus and simultaneously on the Internet as a MOOC. (Later reported as over 170,000 students). Andy Kessler wrote:

    Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No.411. (That is, 0.25% of the online students did better than the best enrolled Stanford students attending the lecture).

    And he quotes Mr. Thrun:

    “The AI class was the first light. Online education will way exceed the best education today. And cheaper. If this works, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of society and the world. If you think Facebook’s neat, wait five to 10 years. So many open [education] problems will be solved.”

    Kessler also reported: “Mr.Thrun’s cost was basically $1 per student per class.”

    At the same time last year some colleges and universities had to explain why they were not participating in the MOOCs.

    Many college and universities have online learning. Some believe these online pedagogies are more effective for their students. They do not say that MOOCs have no role in global learning. Most agree MOOCs can, as Thrun believes, make a major contribution to global learning, especially where there are limited educational opportunities.

    If Thrun’s cost estimates are representative and if the MOOC technology is implemented throughout U.S. higher education as suggested, $138 billion per year could be saved. Universities believe there can be cost savings from online learning technologies, but not the savings promised by the most enthusiastic MOOC supporters.

    Three cases show how the universities responded to last summer’s MOOC-mania (here, subscription required)—the University of Southern California, University of Oklahoma, and the “Big Ten plus one” Committee on Institutional Cooperation—by saying “no.”

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  • BREAKING: Blackboard Uses “MOOC” in a Sentence

    This week we heard the news that Blackboard…um…they are…well…something about MOOCs. They like them, I think. Or something.

    Look, I get it. The company has realized that they need to take more direct action in response to the MOOC trend and, while they are not yet in position to make a specific product announcements, they want to let their customers know of their intention to do so. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s please all get with the fact that the real story at the moment is Blackboard’s recognition that they need to have a MOOC strategy and not anything that they have…you know…actually done. At least, not anything that they have shown us yet. As far as I can tell, what Blackboard has announced is that they have an announcement. A newsworthy announcement for sure, but still just words. There is nothing MOOCish they have shown us this week that we haven’t already seen. It is hard to tell that from a casual read of most of the coverage.

    This is more a criticism of the ed tech press and blogosphere than it is of Blackboard. Transparency is good. I like it when a company’s executives tell us what they are thinking about and planning. There also was some substance to the announcement at a business level. We now know that Blackboard’s MOOC platform will be free and that it will not be CourseSites. That is new information. Sure, they could have been a little less hype-y about it—their press release does read like a product announcement—but really, they are well within bounds of normal corporate PR puffery. If we can’t read between the lines correctly, then shame on us.

    As Phil has pointed out, the collision course between MOOC providers and LMS providers is becoming a clear and significant trend, and Blackboard’s announcement is one data point confirming that trend. But at this point I have no idea what they think it means for them to play in the MOOC space, how serious they are about it, or whether their product entry will be interesting. We will have to wait and see what they do.

  • Review: Sir John Daniel on MOOCs, Online Learning, and Quality

    As part of the transformation of teaching and learning in higher education, decisions are being made on the type and scope of online learning and whether to participate in MOOCs—a specific form of online learning.

    AcademicPartnersTwo papers about MOOCs and online learning have been published by Dallas-based Academic Partners, an academic support company. They deserve the attention of those in colleges and universities making those decisions. What makes these specific papers important is Sir John Daniel’s participation as author or editor. Leading the UK’s Open University from 1990 to 2001, he assembled a talented and dedicated team that had to develop learning processes adapted to the needs of non-residential students, to lead the transition into learning technologies, ensure quality, and be financially successful. Combining this background and a history of scholarship, his thorough and pragmatic approach yielded two publications that share his insight as an understandable guide for discussions with Boards, state executives and legislators, and the press and public.

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  • The Flip and the Rise of Courseware

    My new favorite edublogger (not counting my dear friends here on e-Literate, to whom I am partial) is Mike Caufield over at Hapgood. I don’t know how I missed him up until now, but I was very lucky to meet him at a recent Lumen Learning event. I learn something valuable from just about every post of his that I read.

    Case in point: His post on the distributed flip based on a talk he gave at InstructureCon. (Sadly, I have missed most of the LMS conferences this year due to other business travel.) This is a nuanced and interesting piece that is worth reading in its entirety.

    That said, there is one idea I’d like to highlight that is related to something that Phil and I have written about quite a bit. It all starts with the notion of the “cognitive cutoff” as the motivation for the flipped classroom. At it’s heart, it’s a simple idea. If you want your students to learn a sophisticated concept, they have to learn the simpler concepts that form the foundation first. One way to think about flipping is that the students are getting the foundation at home so that you can guide them through the sophisticated stuff in class. The line between the “at-home” stuff and the “in class” stuff is the cognitive cutoff. It’s the line between the stuff you think they can handle on their own and the stuff you think they’re really going to need your help with.

    But here’s where Mike takes the idea someplace fascinating:

    What I find interesting about the cognitive cutoff from an educational materials perspective is this. If your cognitive cutoff is low – somewhere just over remembering – your educational materials issue is pretty simple, and you might be able to deal with it by recording some mini-lectures and combining them with textbook readings. In this sort of scenario it’s completely possible that a faculty member could do this by themselves, though admittedly at an increased workload.

    But what if you want to push that cognitive cutoff to where [Robert] Talbert is pushing it? And what if you want to develop a rich set of activities and materials that support the students in reaching that cutoff before class?

    I’d propose that to do that in a really effective way requires more work than any one single faculty member can do, and that when you get into designing online components that test application, understanding, and analysis that you may also be pulling from skills that are not traditionally those of faculty (e.g. instructional design). You have to get beyond the cottage industry model of course design.

    If the residential college, or its digital…er…analog of traditional faculty-led distance learning, is going to be able to continue to justify its existence in the face of alternative methods that will increasingly provide lower cost structures, it has to have a set of pedagogical approaches that can deliver very high learning impact on a reliable basis. Mike’s suggestion of keeping the cognitive cutoff high is one reasonable strategy for achieving that impact. But taking that strategy will entail faculty accepting a new relationship to their course designs. It means they have to rely increasingly on research done by cross-functional teams across many class cohorts for the course and curricular materials designs, and invest their personal sense of self-worth instead on what they accomplish in the classroom as an advanced coach. Unfortunately, some faculty seem to equate this sort of change with them becoming “glorified TAs”—an idea frequently expressed with an air of disdain.