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.

Recommended Reading: Signs of Restraint in the Analytics Hype Machine

Mike Sharkey’s recent post on the Blackboard blog site, “Analytics isn’t a thing,” triggered by an epiphany he had while reading the latest NMC Horizon Report, suggests that we might finally be seeing a maturation in the much-hyped analytics space. Rather than viewing analytics as a product category in and of itself, Mike concludes that the market is finally embracing analytics as a tool that can help solve discrete problems in specific situations. He writes:

“My point is that we shouldn’t be “selling analytics” and customers shouldn’t be looking to “buy analytics.” Analytics isn’t a thing. Analytics help solve problems like retention, student success, operational efficiency, or engagement.”

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March 13, 2017
Why Ed Tech Will Fail to Transform Education (for Now)

A while back, I wrote a post arguing that algorithm-based ed tech like learning analytics and adaptive learning will not sell well as long as educators do not have the mathematical and scientific literacies necessary to understand the rationale and limitations of the ways in which the software makes evaluations. They won’t trust it because they can’t know when and how it works and when and how it fails. It is as if we are trying to invent the pharmaceutical industry in absence of a medical profession.

Today I will extend that analogy to argue that even revolutionary developments in educational technology will fail to have the dramatic impact (or “efficacy,” in the newly common parlance that was borrowed from medicine) without changes to the fundamental fabric of the institutions and culture of academe. By looking at the history of one particular medical innovation and imagining what might have happened if it had been discovered when the state of medical science and practice looked more like the state of today’s learning science and educational practice, we can learn a lot about how a technology needs to be embedded in a set of cultural and institutional supports in order to achieve widespread adoption, acceptance, and effective use. This has direct bearing on the situation with educational technology today.

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March 13, 2017
Vert Capital and Scriba Corp: Institutions losing course data in company’s death throes

After last year’s disastrous outage at UC Davis due to Scriba Corp’s change of data center for the Sakai LMS (branded as SmartSite at UC Davis), it turns out that there is more damage to be done as the company slowly disappears. What appears to have happened in the past few months is that Scriba has not been paying this new data center provider (IO Data Centers), and that company is withholding the data on its servers until the issue is resolved. The end result is that several remaining Scriba customers have lost not just a live Sakai site but also the underlying current and historic course data. In at least one case, this dispute has caused a distance education program to be halted until the school figures out how to set up a new LMS site and to recreate their course content.

Based on two people familiar with Scriba’s recent operations, despite several remaining schools continuing to pay hosting fees, Scriba was not fully paying IO Data Centers. While I have no information on whether there was a legitimate complaint or whether this was simply non-payment to save cash while Scriba died, I will point out that last Spring Scriba’s contract with the Apereo Foundation to remain a commercial affiliate was cancelled under similar circumstances. Scriba simply stopped paying Apereo until the foundation’s board voted to terminate their contract. (more…)

February 16, 2017
Ellucian Stops Support for Brainstorm, its CBE platform

In a surprise move, Ellucian has decided to end support for Brainstorm, the competency-based education (CBE) platform it acquired from Helix Education two years ago. All Brainstorm customers are being notified of the end-of-life and aggressive measures are being used to help these customers quickly migrate to alternative platforms.

Ellucian staff contacted me to share the general news of ending Brainstorm support. The stated reason for this change is that Ellucian perceives that there is insufficient market demand for full CBE programs, with many schools looking to ease into CBE in a minimalist fashion (I’m paraphrasing here). Brainstorm was designed primarily for non seat-time courses that are fully based on a competency framework and self-paced student access. We have covered Brainstorm / Helix on these issues here, including this observation:

One educational model that is becoming more and more important is competency-based education (CBE). One of the challenges for this model is that the traditional LMS – based on a traditional model using grades, seat time and synchronous cohort of students – is not easily adapted to serve CBE needs.

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February 14, 2017
Scaling Educational Access

There’s an interesting piece in EdSurge about the potential access to education challenge that CUNY will face if Governor Cuomo makes good on his proposal to make college tuition free:

According to the CUNY 2016 Student Experience Survey, 21 percent of the system’s community college students were not able to take required courses, most citing “lack of seat availability” as the reason. In an interview, George Otte, CUNY’s director of academic technology, described the “bottleneck” created by course shortages. Students were not able to take required courses because demand for space exceeded capacity—a problem that could get worse if more free tuition-seekers pour in. “We have always had lots of enrollment, which is one of the reasons I think we were late to the online course offerings. Our mission was never to gain students from the outside,” he explains, “but we are just beginning to realize that this has an enormous impact on capacity.”

“The real challenge is that eligibility is predicated on full-time enrollment,” Otte says, citing a caveat community colleges cannot ignore. Without taking 15 hours a semester, which equals full-time enrollment, students are not elible for Gov. Cuomo’s free tuition program—the Excelsior Scholarship. However, at least half of community college students work full-time. It is unlikely that such a population can opt-in to campus-based instruction that requires them to commute and show up for courses offered only at, say, 9 a.m. or 4 p.m.

It turns out that we’ve done a lot of work in this area, particularly in the state of California, and have some lessons learned that are worth sharing.

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February 9, 2017
Understanding Learning Science and Its Value to Educators

In a world where we are constantly barraged with product claims about “learning science,” most educators have very little sense of what that really means and how it is relevant to what they do. I was lucky enough to be able to hear from and interview some actual academic learning sciences last year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Simon Initiative. The trip itself was paid for by CMU—I was part of a group of “media fellows”—and the video production was paid for by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The result was a trio of interview videos that I’m particularly pleased to share. (more…)

February 8, 2017
Improved NAU Student Success in Subsequent Courses After Math Emporium

Last week I published three e-Literate TV episodes on Northern Arizona University and their suite of initiatives aimed at helping first-year (and often first-generation) students. In those videos, NAU staff made some interesting claims, in particular that they are seeing improved student performance in subsequent courses after students take one of their modified emporium math courses in the Lumberjack Mathematics Center.

(YouTube playlist: http://bit.ly/etv_NAU)

(Video source specific claim: http://bit.ly/NAU_SMCclaim)

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February 1, 2017