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.

  • Our LMS Subscription is Available Today

    Today we are pleased to announce that our LMS subscription service is available for purchase. As promised, we have kept the promotion on the blog to a minimum, providing details instead to people who specifically sign up for the mailing list. But since today is the big unveiling, it seems appropriate to tell you all a little bit about it and what it means for where we are going with the blog and our work.

    The subscription is called “e-Literate Big Picture: LMS.” As you might guess from the title, there will be other “e-Literate Big Picture” subscriptions. Each of these will provide regular updates and in-depth analysis that go beyond the free analysis that we will continue to provide here on the blog, focused particularly on helping campuses make good decisions about how to evaluate, acquire, implement, and support educational technology in ways that will have the most positive impact for students and faculty. They will extend the work of the blog with analysis that is more actionable.

    In the case of this first subscription, we have been able to augment our analysis of the LMS  market with data and analytics support from our partner LISTedTECH. Their database contains information on LMS selections of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, plus thousands of more worldwide. The database goes well beyond who is using which LMS today, as it also contains information on LMS migrations (decommission, implementations, pilots, etc) over the last 15 years. This information has given us an unprecedented chance to both test hypotheses we’ve had about the LMS market as well as form new ones. The bottom line is that we have gained insights into how the LMS market is changing that we believe are new. (more…)

  • We Have Personalization Backwards

    [Note – an earlier version of the first half of this post was first published at Mike’s Hapgood site. We asked him to make some alterations for the e-Literate audience and republish here. – ed]

    Indie Rock and Donald Trump

    I drive my oldest daughter to high school every day. She goes to a magnet STEM school in the district that’s on the campus where I work. I’ve been brainwashing her into liking indie rock one car ride at a time using carefully planned mix CDs.

    Last week she tells me I need to put more Magnetic Fields songs in the mix. Why? I ask.

    “Physics homework.” she says.

    It turns out that there’s a number of principles of physics that she remembers through a complex set of associations she’s developed referencing indie rock songs. I don’t pretend to get them all, but the 69 Love Songs hit “Meaningless” plays an apparently crucial role.

    Later that day, my youngest daughter is asking me about the book Persepolis, a book about growing up Iranian during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The author of that book spends the preface talking about the reasons she wrote it, and how she felt the understanding of her native country of Iran was too narrow, and in a way, too exotic. My daughter tells me that she doesn’t quite get what the author is talking about. After all, there’s a lot of fundamentalism in the early parts of the book — and people really are in a revolution in 1978, so what are we getting wrong in the West?

    I know that this daughter, a middle schooler, has had some stress about Donald Trump. She has people in her class who like him, and she can’t understand why when he’s so mean. It worries her.

    I ask her if Trump gets elected, how would she feel if everyone assumed all Americans were like Donald Trump. Well, we wouldn’t be, she says.

    Oh, she says.

    We Have Personalization Backwards

    (more…)

  • The Battle for “Personalized Learning”

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    So here we go again. Another terminology war. First there was the battle for open. Then the battle for MOOCs. Somewhere in there was the battle for edupunk.

    I stay out of terminology wars because, even though they are often about very real and important issues, the emphasis on finding a single correct definition tends to distract rather than focus the conversation.

    It’s a different with “personalized learning” because there is no fight over its meaning right now. Rather, it seems to have no specific meaning at all. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with “adaptive learning.” But not always. And not exactly. More often it means, roughly, “robot tutor in the sky.” Shorter version: “WHEEEEEE!!!” Or maybe, “Wingardium leviosa!”

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    Phil and I have decided to claim this prime piece of linguistic real estate. We are asserting squatters’ rights.

    (more…)

  • A Retrospective on Implementing Common Course Management Systems

    At e-Literate we mostly avoid blogging about our consulting work through MindWires Consulting, but we have an opportunity with our work for California’s Online Education Initiative (OEI) to share information with the higher education community on a topic of growing importance. The OEI is California Community College System’s approach to help individual colleges collaborate with their online courses and programs, including a OEI Course Exchange to be launched this Fall in pilot mode that will “allow students to register for online courses across participating colleges without requiring students to complete separate application and matriculation processes”.

    Last year we at MindWires helped OEI select a Common Course Management System (yes, they use the CMS language instead of LMS) by providing market analysis and facilitating the group decision-making process. This year they asked us to review similar efforts at other consortia in the US and Canada. The point of a CCMS is not the technology platform itself but rather what the common e-learning infrastructure could allow a consortium to do – address issues such as course redesign, professional development, student support, etc. Even though the OEI was based on selecting a common system from the beginning and has experienced significant adoption already, there is still a great deal of value in learning from others that have gone before. We are releasing the result of this work with the report – “A Retrospective on Implementing Course Management Systems: Motivations, Benefits, Drawbacks and Recommendations“. (more…)

  • No Filters: My ASU/GSV Conference Panel on Personalized Learning

    ASU’s Lou Pugliese was kind enough to invite me to participate on a panel discussion on “Next-Generation Digital Platforms,” which was really about a soup of adaptive learning, CBE, and other stuff that the industry likes to lump under the heading “personalized learning” these days. One of the reasons the panel was interesting was that we had some smart people on the stage who were often talking past each other a little bit because the industry wants to talk about the things that it can do something about—features and algorithms and product design—rather than the really hard and important parts that it has little influence over—teaching practices and culture and other messy human stuff. I did see a number of signs at the conference (and on the panel) that ed tech businesses and investors are slowly getting smarter about understanding their respective roles and opportunities. But this particular topic threw the panel right into the briar patch. It’s hard to understand a problem space when you’re focusing on the wrong problems. I mean no disrespect to the panelists or to Lou; this is just a tough nut to crack.

    I admit, I have few filters under the best of circumstances and none left at all by the second afternoon of an ASU/GSV conference. I was probably a little disruptive, but I prefer to think of it as disruptive innovation.

    Here’s the video of the panel:

  • Blackboard CEO’s First 100 Days: Reorganization and Learn Ultra Updates

    Just over four years after Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company hired Bill Ballhaus as its new CEO at the beginning of January. 100 days in, Ballhaus is starting to make changes to the organization and providing some insights into future corporate directions.

    The most significant change is a reorganization that combines strategy, product management and marketing in one group under Katie Blot. In an interview Michael and I had with Ballhaus and Blot earlier this week, they described the primary motivation for the organizational change as the need to more tightly align those functions. Also significant is that this change means the departure of Mark Strassman, SVP Product Marketing & Management, and Tracey Stout, SVP of Marketing & Sales Effectiveness. Blackboard provided the following statement. (more…)

  • Pop Quiz

    Which CEO has recently said or done all of the following:

    • Suggested to an audience of VCs and ed tech entrepreneurs at the GSV conference that the importance of big data in education has been overstated
    • Told that same audience that the biggest gains from adaptive learning come when it is wrapped in good pedagogy delivered by good teachers
    • Asked former CIOs from Harvard and MIT, both of whom are senior company employees, to develop collaborations with the academic learning science community
    • Accurately described Benjamin Bloom’s two-sigma research, with special attention to the implications for the bottom half of the bell curve
    • When asked a question by an audience member about an IMS technical interoperability standard in development, correctly described both the goals of the standard and its value to educators in plain English

    (more…)