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.

  • Top e-Literate Blog Posts From 2016

    Top e-Literate Blog Posts From 2016

    It’s the new year, and I need to clean out my inbox and do actual work this week. What a perfect time to procrastinate and share some year-in-review info for e-Literate. We changed our email service for e-Literate in early April, and for the first time we’re realizing how much of our readership comes from the listserv and from people forwarding the emails (we provide full-text sharing of posts through an RSS feed to MailChimp). We’ll share two lists – the most-viewed e-Literate posts based on website visits, and the most viewed posts based on email opens. Note that the the latter started in April. Note – I have added the year published for the first list and an asterisk for those posts since April 2016 to help with comparisons to Email Listserv rankings.

    Top 15 Most-Read Blog Posts – Website

    For this list I’m using Google Analytics summary of total page views.

    1. How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? (2015)
    2. Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened (2016)
    3. Scriba Disaster: Sakai-based LMS for UC Davis is down with no plans for recovery (2016) *
    4. What is a Learning Platform? (2012)
    5. PEARSONalized Learning (2016) *
    6. LearningStudio and OpenClass End-Of-Life: Pearson is getting out of LMS market (2016)
    7. Online Program Management: A view of the market landscape (2016) *
    8. The Great Unbundling of Textbook Publishers (2016) *
    9. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2015 Edition (2015)
    10. Schoology: The strongest LMS you’ve never seen (2016) *
    11. State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2016 Edition (2016) *
    12. What Faculty Should Know About Adaptive Learning (2013)
    13. Update: LMS Usage In Large Online Programs (Top 50 in US) (2016) *
    14. Instructurecon 2016: Why This Company is Still Formidable (and Misunderstood) (2016) *
    15. What Blackboard’s New CEO Needs to Do Now (and how you can tell if he’s doing it) (2016)

    (more…)

  • Nordic EdTech Network Podcast Interview

    On December 12, Michael and I joined Eilif Trondsen for a podcast interview for the Nordic EdTech Network. One of the primary activities for the network is to “help Nordic EdTech companies become better informed about the EdTech industry and landscape not only in the Nordic region but also of the global EdTech market dynamics.” Put another way, Eilif is a great network connector. You can access the podcast interview at this page. We are also sharing the interview below.

     

    Some of the questions:

    • What are a couple of things/developments that you have seen out there in the education industry that you think either have had significant impact on current edtech markets, or that may well have significant impact on these markets in the next 2-3 years or so?
    • What have we seen in European procurements related to edtech and how would that impact smaller startups and non-LMS vendors?
    • Do you see opportunities in learning analytics and adaptive learning vendors [with an interest comment about whether Knewton is going to be a dominant player]?
    • Do you have any recommended Dos and Don’ts for any Nordic edtech vendors considering to target the US market?
  • Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    For those following the Piazza privacy issues, we have a new update where the company has made three significant changes in their response to privacy concerns from several universities. They are now using true opt-in for their Careers product, they have stopped the practice of using university logos without permission, and they are now offering an easier process to enter into no-cost agreements. For those who have not followed, read here here and here for background. And remember that this case of Piazza’s usage of student data can be seen as a case study on third-party learning apps as we move closer to the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment / LMS as Hub concept.

    Opt-In vs Opt-Out

    In my original post, one of the key issues I called out was that Piazza did not offer with their Q&A platform a true opt-in method for students to choose to allow their personal data to be shared with recruiters through the Careers product.

    What does that opt-in look like in practice? Faculty assign usage of the platform, and during setup students see a pre-checked box labeled “Sign me up” for opting into the Careers service. (more…)

  • Digging Deeper Into CCSF Story: $39 million for non-usage of LMS not really about DE

    When I wrote my initial post on Tuesday about the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state $39 million for non-usage of LMS, there was one number that kept bugging me.

    We’re not talking about an isolated problem with some faculty forgetting or refusing to use the official LMS. 92% of all courses (based on FTES count) did not comply with collegiate policy, and therefore there are no official participation records ensuring students understood the course requirements or that faculty interacted with students.

    The original San Francisco Chronicle article described the problem as occurring “in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014”, and the independent audit document describes their charge to “review compliance of contact hours claimed for distance education” by CCSF. But 92% of faculty choosing to not use the campus LMS for an online course goes beyond sloppy processes or faculty resistance. There had to be more to the story. (more…)

  • Pearson Releases a Significant Learning Design Aid

    Last week, Pearson announced the release of some resources they have created around science-based learning design. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of our consulting company, although we have not consulted with them on the subject of this post.) The resources in the release include the following:

    • A 102-page rubric the company has started using for evaulating curricular products based on their effective use of learning design principles—released under a Creative Commons license
    • A white paper describing how they are beginning to apply these principles to their own product designs
    • A few links to descriptions of early examples of these principles as they have been applied in released products.
    • A blog post providing some more background and perspective by David Porcaro, Pearson’s Director of Learning Design, whose team is behind this effort.

    In the short term, you should think of this publication as the company’s effort to “show their work,” in the classroom sense of that phrase. They want you to know more about the process they go through to incorporate research-backed learning design principles into their products. They hope that doing so will increase your confidence in the value of those products. In the medium term, they also aspire to make the framework they are developing for themselves also a useful tool for the academic community, particularly as the company refines and expands on this early release of the materials.

    In my view, the work itself is a significant contribution. It also is a positive indicator about Pearson’s future direction as a participant in and influencer of that community, although how strong an indicator is a much harder question to evaluate. And it gives us another clue about the co-evolution of educational institutions and ed tech vendors that we are likely to see over the next years and decades. In this post, I’m going to evaluate each of these aspects in turn.

    (more…)

  • Explainer Videos on Course Exchanges and the Shared Infrastructure Behind Them

    Two months ago O’Neal Spicer and I wrote an op-ed for the Community College Daily describing our observations on the California Online Education Initiative (OEI). We don’t often write about clients of ours, but in this case we felt it would be useful to share our thoughts outside of the consulting context, and the OEI staff agreed.

    While some argued that a parallel system of MOOCs, unbundled course and third-party operators should step-in, the state opted to re-invest in its existing faculty and infrastructure. At the heart of what became known as the Online Education Initiative (OEI) was a system for an online course exchange that could help to improve access to courses that were oversubscribed or not available at local campuses.

    California was not alone in making the move toward a system where a consortium of campuses pooled resources to offer online courses for students across multiple campuses. North Carolina has done so, as has Colorado and Mississippi and several others. Part of the attraction of course exchanges comes from the acknowledgement that with online education, the campus walls do not need to be an artificial barrier.

    Ryan Craig wrote a separate piece for Forbes on the upcoming release of the OEI course exchange as did Ashley Smith at Inside Higher Ed.

    We thought it would be useful to explore this concept of course exchanges more broadly. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) OEI is not the first course exchange – Colorado Community College System, University of North Carolina System, Mississippi Virtual Community College, Kentucky Virtual Campus, to name a few other initiatives ((Disclosure: Besides OEI, Colorado Community College System and Mississippi Community College System are past clients of either MindWires or its predecessors.)). What is the concept of course exchanges and what problem is being addressed? In a nutshell, you can think of this as removing the traditional boundaries of higher ed, as described in our first video.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/HBCVAau8hK8)

    (more…)

  • Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state of California $39 million due to an audit of distance education courses.

    City College of San Francisco, struggling for every dollar it can muster, must repay the state nearly $39 million because it can’t prove that instructors taught thousands of students in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014, an audit revealed.

    City College has been unable to verify teaching about 16,000 students in 587 online courses — from Accent Improvement to Cardiorespiratory Emergencies — over the three-year period, according to the state-commissioned audit that ended in September.

    It took a little bit of digging during a conference call (shh, don’t tell the hosts), but it looks like the issue was that the vast majority of faculty teaching online or hybrid courses chose to not use the centralized Moodle LMS system despite district policy that the LMS is the official record of student and faculty interaction.  (more…)