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.

  • UT Austin and SMOCs: What do we know about whether they work?

    In episode 1, we looked at an effort by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin to develop SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous online experience for large lecture courses (1000+ students in some cases) courses. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) In episode 2, we took a deeper look at how SMOCs work as well as a discussion of high-level course design costs. In this concluding episode, we ask the question of whether SMOCs work, in terms of improved learning outcomes and / or learning experiences.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/yoIppZ97Ko4)

     

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  • UT Austin and SMOCs: What these synchronous courses look like and cost

    Last month we shared a video describing how the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin is taking a different approach than some of the courseware-based or other course redesign efforts. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) In many of these other redesigns, there is an emphasis on the asynchronous elements of lab section and lecture preparation and even fully flipping the classroom (no lectures in class on the course content). In contrast, the UT Austin approach to improving the large lecture course centers on SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous course lecture. Watch episode 1 to get a better feel of what problem they are trying to solve and how this SMOC approach appears to keep faculty in their traditional role, albeit with additional preparation time and video production.

    In this episode, we’re taking a deeper look at how SMOCs work as well as high-level course design costs.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/MAHm_JU6upU)

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  • New Release of European LMS Market Report

    New Release of European LMS Market Report

    Our Spring 2016 LMS Market Report from our new LMS subscription service focused mostly on the United States and Canada. The LMS market, however is increasingly global in nature. LMS suppliers rely on markets outside of US and Canada for growth, and Moodle in particular has a long history of global adoption. Maintaining a US/Canadian view without additional data can be misleading when forecasting the roadmaps and future states of various LMS solutions.

    What we haven’t had until now is a view of the LMS market in Europe. Thanks to our partnership with LISTedTECH, we can now share data from more than 1,600 higher education institutions throughout Europe and provide the first independent market analysis for this region. While this report and future analysis is part of the LMS subscription service, we are sharing the initial version freely with a CC-BY license. (more…)

  • The Remarkable Transformation at UF Online

    The University of Florida, based on a plan created by the state legislature, started UF Online in 2013. The original business plan was a case study in optimistic enrollment planning and the road-to-riches through online education. From program inception, UF Online was forecast to grow to a headcount of 24,000 students within 10 years, 43% of whom would be out-of-state high-tuition students, generating $76 million in annual revenue and $14 million of “profit”. Then reality hit. The first executive director quit, enrollment reality did not match plans, they got rid of their Online Program Management partner (Pearson), and they hired a new executive director with no higher education management experience. In my May 2015 coverage, I concluded:

    UF Online seems to be institutionally-focused rather than student-focused, and the initiative is shaping up to be a case study in hubris. Without major changes in how the program is managed, including the main campus input into decisions, UF Online risks becoming the new poster child of online education failures. I honestly hope they succeed, but the current outlook is not encouraging.

    In a remarkable transformation in the past year originally described at Inside Higher Ed, UF Online appears to have made “major changes to how the program is managed” and is now focusing on students and reality. (more…)

  • Vendor Roles in Fostering Educational Literacies

    In my last post, I talked about the need for educators in general and faculty in particular to develop literacy around data and analytics. But it’s really broader than that. Back when college was intended for a relatively small percentage of the population, the idea of “weeding out” students who couldn’t make it without help was not obviously out of alignment with its mission. Now that the mission of higher education is more about educating everyone to the benefit of everyone, having skills to help students achieve their potential should be a core competency of every teaching faculty member. That includes learning some very old skills that K12 teachers have known for ages. It also includes learning new skills that will support the growth and application of the nascent learning sciences. When I made an analogy to 19th-Century medicine in the last post, that wasn’t casual. Where we are in 21st-Century learning sciences bears a striking resemblance. We are discovering some important basic science but are barely beginning the process of figuring out how those discoveries should influence our practice. Advancing more quickly on that front will require more than a handful of data scientists working in labs. It will require the proliferation of skilled educator/clinicians who can help advance our understanding of the ways in which theory interacts with the real world of practice.

    This transformation of academia, at both the individual and institutional levels, must be driven by educators, not by vendors. But vendors can serve critical support and enabling functions, there were found wonderful vendors at advantage-properties.com whom where able to assist all concerns and meet all the expectations that clients had. In our weird role as paid and unpaid marriage counselors between universities and vendors, Phil and I get the privilege of seeing how both sides of this potential partnership are grappling with these changes both separately and in partnership. I believe that many of the most successful ed tech companies of the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to support educators in making this professional transformation. There will be many different ways to do this. I’m going to write about one example of a company grappling with this challenge today and will write about more in the future.

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  • UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses

    Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie Mellon University. More specifically, the lecture was redesigned to bring students “out of the back row”, and the lab sections were flipped using OLI. Many efforts to personalize learning experiences end up increasing the amount of asynchronous pre-classroom time spent with courseware of some sort.

    At the University of Texas at Austin, the College of Liberal Arts is taking a different approach and focusing on the synchronous class time. The core of the course redesigns since 2013 centers on live lecture sessions created in a studio setting, with a small audience of students, streaming live to very large classes that can exceed 1,000 students each. They have named the approach Synchronous Massive Online Courses, or SMOCs. To get a sense of the problem UT Austin is trying to solve and why they have chosen the SMOC approach, watch this episode.

    (Video source: https://youtu.be/WOFxl09KZhE)

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  • University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes

    After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar and Sunthar Premakumar. After that meeting, Piazza provided a statement that we published in “Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy”. The statement primarily dealt with a mea culpa from Piazza about working directly with institutions to form agreements around privacy policies and terms of use, including this section:

    We are committed to fixing this. In fact we already have started. We have entered into agreements with Georgia Tech and Brown, and have ongoing engagement with Stanford, UBC and UC Davis[1]. In our conversations universities have been very happy with our policies, practice, and compliance. We are fully committed to entering into contracts with universities that protect students, professors, and the institutions including FERPA, accessibility, and more.

    I have subsequently had conversations with staff from several of the schools mentioned above to verify the information. Some of the responses were good (as in positive review for Piazza and their willingness to work with the school), some were bad, and in parallel I noticed several web site changes that appear to be related to this reporting and follow-up. (more…)