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.

  • Summary of Statements Before California Panel Discussion on Online Education

    As Michael mentioned, the two of us will be participating in a panel discussion next week – Rebooting CA Higher Education, sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation, on January 8th. The event will be live streamed.

    I’ve been asked to give a short talk based on my recent EDUCAUSE Review article that described various online educational models, and I will also moderate several panels. Given my role, I’d like to collect links to several of the key posts and articles that frame the issues to be discussed next week. After the event I’ll share my thoughts on the discussions.

    Statements Prior to Formation of Online Symposium

    The panel discussion is based on governor Jerry Brown’s call for the three public higher education systems in California (University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges) to evaluate online education as one method to control or reduce student costs. In particular, much of the discussion started during Governor Brown’s meeting with the UC Regents on Nov 14, 2012.

  • The Rising Non-Instructional Cost of College Exemplified By University of Minnesota

    This past weekend the Wall Street Journal published an insightful article on administrative bloat at the University of Minnesota and how it typifies a major problem relating to rising tuition and student debt. The article is heavily based on the new president of the university, Eric Kaler, and his attempts to address rising costs. Unfortunately the article was posted over the weekend and is behind a paywall, but I’ll excerpt some relevant sections.

    When Eric Kaler became president of the University of Minnesota last year, he pledged to curb soaring tuition by cutting administrative overhead. But he hit a snag: No one could tell him exactly what it cost to manage the school.

    Like many public colleges, the University of Minnesota went on a spending spree over the past decade, paid for by a steady stream of state money and rising tuition. Officials didn’t keep close tabs on their payroll as it swelled beyond 19,000 employees, nearly one for every 3½ students. “The more questions I asked, the less happy I was,” Dr. Kaler said.

    Charles Lane at the Washington Post wrote a column today based on the WSJ story, which thankfully is available without a paywall. He summarized some of the key findings of the WSJ study.

    At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human resources” or “personnel” in their job titles has grown from 180 to 272 since the 2004-05 academic year. Since 2006, the university has spent $10 million on consultants for a vast new housing development that is decades from completion. It employs 139 people for marketing, promotions and communications. Some 81 administrators make $200,000 per year or more.

    In the past decade, Minnesota’s administrative payroll has gone up three times as fast as the teaching payroll, and twice as fast as student enrollment.

    Oh, and tuition more than doubled in that same period, to more than $13,000 per year.

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  • California Discusses Cost and Effectiveness in Higher Education

    On the heels of the passage of a historic tax increase to cover deficits in the California higher education system, the UC system is apparently already warning that they may need to raise tuition again. In response, Governor Jerry Brown has called for action and discussion about rising tuition costs, and in particular, to discuss how getting more aggressive with online education might help the cost situation. The Los Angeles Times characterized it this way:

    “In order to meet the needs going forward without constant large tuition increases, there will have to be different ways in which people learn and people teach,” Brown said.

    He told the regents — and they quickly agreed — to invite industry leaders in free online education, such as the Udacity website, to the January meeting to discuss how UC can more aggressively get into the digital classroom.

    Brown said he wanted those talks to be “not in the gilded tones of academia but in the harsh reality of the marketplace and technologies.”

    In response this call, the 20 Million Minds Foundation is sponsoring a conversation about controlling rising costs while maintaining (or improving) quality in the California public higher education systems from 9 AM to 2 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, January 8th. More information, including the full agenda and the webcast sign-up form, can be found on the home page of 20mm.org.

    This event has the potential to be impactful for a variety of reasons. First, the folks who are organizing the event were directly involved with California’s new law to fund the creation of 50 open textbooks for higher education. Their involvement by itself means it is likely to be an interesting event. Second, it comes at a critical moment in California’s funding situation. Something has to change. Third, it’s California. What happens there matters, both because the state is so big and because it has been a model for quality public higher education. Californians still have a great deal of civic pride invested in that idea of themselves (which may be why Governor Brown was able to pass the tax increase). And finally, with the MOOC hype at its apex, previously unthinkable technology-driven changes to large, conservative prestige schools are suddenly not only thinkable but positively trendy.

    It turns out that e-Literate will have its own little part in this grand drama. Our very own Phil Hill will be both a speaker and the moderator of several panels. I will have the privilege of participating on one of the panels. Never having been at an event like this before, I will be fascinated to see how it all plays out. Obviously, various folks will be coming with different agendas. From my personal perspective, while I’m not a big believer in the role of the “harsh reality of the marketplace” as a driver for educational policy, I do think the harsh reality of student debt burdens should motivate a sense of urgency. And I think there is a huge opportunity for a long overdue rethink of how we approach education. Fellow panelist Candace Thille from CMU’s OLI has said it well:

    “Rather than using information technology to mimic or scale typical classroom teaching methods, I hope the participants will begin to discuss how to use emerging technologies to effectively re-engineer the teaching and learning process as a whole.  We have the opportunity to address large-scale societal issues in higher education while simultaneously making progress in our fundamental understanding of human learning.

    Another issue we need to address is balancing institutional competition and collaboration.  Many higher education pundits believe that the competitive nature of American higher education is a key reason that many American research universities are the best in the world. However, pursuing innovation in teaching and in education research are areas in which, I believe, we can make progress more rapidly through a better balance between competition and large-scale collaboration.”

    If the conversation can get beyond a zero-sum political tug-of-war between disruptive xMOOC companies and traditional academic institutions to a genuine dialog about new possibilities, then this could turn out to be a big deal. But as I said, I’ve never been to anything like this before and I’m frankly not sure what to expect. It will be interesting.

  • Open as in Transparent: Instructure Conducts 2nd Public Security Audit on Canvas LMS

    I wrote a series of posts last fall about security testing for higher ed LMS products. In my initial post I called for more transparency.

    We need more transparency in the LMS market, and clients should have access to objective measurements of the security of a solution. To paraphrase Michael Feldstein’s suggestions from a 2009 post:

    • There is no guarantee that any LMS is more secure just because they say they are more secure
    • Customers should ask for, and LMS vendors should supply, detailed information on how the vendor or open source community has handled security issues in practice
    • LMS providers should make public a summary of vulnerabilities, including resolution time

    I would add to this call for transparency that LMS vendors and open source communities should share information from their third-party security audits and tests. All of the vendors that I talked to have some form of third-party penetration testing and security audits; however, how does this help the customer unless this information is transparent and available. Of course this transparency should not include details that would advertise vulnerabilities to hackers, but there should be some manner to be open and transparent on what the audits are saying.

    Subsequently I was asked by Instructure to serve as an embedded reporter as they undertook a public security audit. In a post from January 2012, Josh Coates called for other LMS vendors to follow suit.

    Despite the lack of response, Instructure declared their intent to test again in fall 2012.

    We will kick off our second annual open security audit in Q4. We invite any and all education companies to participate. We think education should be open, safe, and secure — and that corporations should be held accountable for their claims.

    Second Annual Audit for Canvas LMS

    True to their word, Instructure conducted another audit this year, again using Securus Global, described in this blog post and documented in this Securus report. I did not act as an embedded report this time around, but I would like to highlight some of the findings from the report.

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  • MOOCs in 2012: Dismantling the Status Quo

    The dominant story in higher education for 2012 was clearly the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), particularly the xMOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. There has been a lot of debate on the merits of xMOOCs in terms of disruption, business model and academic quality. While I think these questions are interesting, the more important impact from xMOOCs can be seen in terms of forcing higher education as a system or culture to no longer ignore online education as a self-contained side issue and instead evaluate the role of online education for all of higher education.

    Ignoring the Impact of Online Education

    For decades, if not centuries, the higher education system in the US has been holding on to a relatively stable status quo. Demand for postsecondary degrees constantly rises, the economic value of these degrees rises, the reputation of institutions remains high. This status quo has held despite two very uncomfortable underlying issues. One is that tuition and total student costs at a faster rate than inflation or even health care. The second is that US higher education as a system has not leveraged the remarkable gains from technology that almost every other industry has achieved.

    It’s true that there have been many innovations in higher education based on technology usage such as online software, but the system at large has been remarkably resilient and avoided any structural change. Yes, the vast majority of institutions have a centrally-supported LMS, but the pedagogical design of most courses has remained unchanged. Yes, many individual faculty have designed rich learning experiences within their courses, but their departments and colleges have typically resisted the uncomfortable discussion of whether these new pedagogical models should diffuse to the broader set of courses and programs. Yes, there have been online education innovations from for-profits and even public colleges such as Rio Salado and SNHU, but these organizations have remained self-contained and not directly affected the mainline non-profit educational model.

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  • Postscript to “This Time Is Different: Enrollment and Employment Divergence”

    In a post two days ago, I showed US data comparing enrollment and employment trends. The salient feature of the data that I called out was the significant divergence of the two trend lines since 2006.

    When you look at the data from 1970 – 2012, the results could explain some significant pressures experienced by higher education institutions. In a nutshell – this time is different, we are in uncharted territory.

    There are two related comments that I would like to address, both of which ask the question of whether the mix of full-time vs. part-time enrollment explains part of the divergence noted.

    The first (excerpted) comment is from Thomas Warger under the original post:

    I have to wonder how much of the gap you show here can be attributed to the increased availability of pay-as-you-go higher education–opportunities to take a few credits at a time at a community college or an online provider? Does “normalized for 1980″ factor for this relatively new phenomenon?

    The second comment is from Stephen Downes in his OLDaily blog:

    I don’t agree with the proposition that “this time it’s different.” Here’s what Phil Hill writes: “The conventional wisdom holds that enrollment jumps when employment drops, and the data does show some divergence followed a few years later by a correction. What is different this time is A) the magnitude of the divergence and B) the start of the divergence fully two years before the recession started in 2008.” I think the apparent spike in enrollments is created by a lot of part-time and online learning, and that it is a bit illusory. It’s also caused by echo-boom effects, as the population born between 1982-1995 is in post-secondary education between 2002-1015, give or take. If (and it’s a big if) employment improves, I would expect a dramatic drop in (traditional) enrollment.

    What’s really different is that world population is reaching a breaking point, climate change is disrupting food supplies and other industry, resource depletion has become a significant problem, and (by contrast) worldwide prosperity, literacy and general awareness has led to an increasingly restive global population. There is moreover a chronic economic imbalance, with increasingly large quantities of wealth simply being hoarded instead of invested (it’s an amount that if deployed would makemoney itself meaningless). U.S. demographic trends – which could be rendered obsolete with one major wave of immigration – are irrelevant in the face of these wider forcess.

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  • This Time Is Different: US Enrollment and Employment Divergence

    When looking at long-term trends for higher education, it is useful to step back and look at the big picture. With this goal in mind, consider the comparison of post-secondary enrollment in degree-granting programs to the total number of jobs (both based on the US). The enrollment data is based on the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) and the employment data is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its Current Population Survey (CPS). To get the big picture I decided to keep this simple – combining full-time and part-time enrollment, and combining full-time and part-time employment. To see the trends, I normalized both data series to 1980.

    When you look at the data from 1970 – 2012, the results could explain some significant pressures experienced by higher education institutions. In a nutshell – this time is different, we are in uncharted territory.

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