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.

  • McGraw Hill’s New Personalized Learning Authoring Product

    In what has to be the softest launch ever, McGraw Hill has been quietly talking about their new personalized learning authoring system. If you ask them when it will be available to all customers, they will tell you “right now.” But since it doesn’t even have a name yet, I’m not sure how customers would ask for it. They occasionally refer to it as their “learning science platform,” but that’s not really its name.

    Here’s a dirty little secret: The “new” authoring platform is essentially a publishing front end for their SmartBooks platform. Not only is it interesting in and of itself; it also gives us some indication of one direction that the textbook publishing industry could go. (By the way, they don’t like to be called “textbook publishers” anymore. I guess the industry needs to come up with a new name for that too.)

    I was able to get a quick overview of the platform from McGraw Hill’s Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster and SVP Zach Posner.

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  • Georgia Tech and Udacity MOOC Degree: Missing targets but still worth watching

    Melissa Korn wrote an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal giving a progress report on that Georgia Tech / Udacity MOOC degree (the master’s in computer science).

    The Georgia Tech online computer-science program is relatively massive: It has 2,789 students enrolled this semester, compared with 312 in the campus-based version. It’s on track to turn a profit by May, according to Charles Isbell Jr., senior associate dean at the College of Computing. It has a steady stream of more than 1,300 applicants for each new term. [snip]

    At Georgia Tech, Mr. Isbell is still thinking on a grand scale: “It wouldn’t surprise me if three years from now we’re talking about 10,000 students instead of 3,000 students,” he said. “This is sustainable and this is scalable.”

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  • Personalized Learning and the Teacher

    A few weeks ago, Jonathan Rees wrote a post calling out that, no matter what potential of so-called “personalized learning” for improving student outcomes, there is a potential—and a temptation—for it to be abused as a method of lowering (labor) costs in a way that also lowers educational quality and effectiveness. This is a serious and realistic concern, particularly as long as personalized learning is framed as a product rather than a set of teaching strategies.

    Phil and I have addressed this concern head-on in our latest piece on EdSurge. I suppose a battle over the meaning of the term was inevitable; why should this one be any different from all the others? There is an enormous disconnect between the way the term is used in product marketing and ed tech circles and the way it is actually applied in the real world in cases places it actually works. I have seen a number of cases in which personalized learning, as an educational strategy, produces good results for students. But every single one of those cases has had one or more good educators leading the charge, thinking hard about how to better serve the students. At its best, personalized learning is an effort to identify those classroom and institutional practices that are depersonalizing, and use technology as an aid to teaching strategies and support processes that can replace those practices with something more humane. Perhaps we should call it “undepersonalized learning.”

    As such, true personalized learning should be labor-friendly in important ways. It should put a premium on skilled educators and make a strong case for increased investment in professional development and teaching-friendly tenure and promotion practices. That doesn’t mean it will always be job-preserving. The focus should be on students and agnostic with respect to student/teacher ratios. It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale. Sometimes. With a lot of thought and iteration. But I have seen no evidence to suggest that personalized learning technologies improve outcomes significantly without good teachers at the helm, and plenty of evidence suggesting that they don’t.

  • LMS Market Updates, Dec 2015

    There seems to be a series of news and analysis on the LMS higher education market worth summarizing.

    Major Adoption News

    I posted last weekend about University of Phoenix (UoP) and their LMS. UoP is well-known for being the biggest user of a homegrown LMS for well over a decade, but in the past several years they rolled out “Classroom”, an entirely new adaptive-learning based design. In a major strategic change, UoP is abandoning this effort and moving to a commercial provider.

    What we can now confirm at e-Literate is that the “learning platform” selected by the University of Phoenix is Blackboard Learn Ultra. This is the cloud-based redesign of Learn that Michael and I have described in several posts. Even with the University of Phoenix’s reduced enrollment, I consider this news to be the most important new client acquisition for Blackboard since at least 2011.

    Today Campus Technology reported that Stanford is moving to adopt Canvas as their campus-wide LMS. Previously Stanford was a founding member of Sakai, with its implementation called CourseWork.

    The university has been piloting Instructure Canvas since the 2014-2015 academic year. The vice provost for teaching & learning (VPTL) said in a statement that about 80 percent of faculty in the pilot reported being “very or somewhat satisfied” with the new platform; even more students (94 percent) found it “very or somewhat easy” to use.

    Alongside the pilot, two Stanford schools had already adopted the application independently. The Graduate School of Education moved to Canvas in 2013-2014, and the Graduate School of Business did so in 2014. Both adoptions were considered successes.

    During this school year, the migration was accelerated. Some 300 classes switched to Canvas. And the plan is to migrate the remaining 4,200 classes still using the legacy LMS software over the next academic year.

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  • Plus Ca Change: About that ed tech adoption curve

    All the same We take our chances
    Laughed at by Time, Tricked by Circumstances
    Plus ca change, Plus c’est la meme chose
    The more that things change, The more they stay the same

    – Rush, Circumstances

    Over the past few years I have increased my usage of the technology adoption curve – originating from Everett Rogers and extended by Geoffrey Moore – to explain some of the tension faced by ed tech support organizations. In a nutshell, a bigger determination of adoption patterns of pedagogical and technology-enabled changes in education is from social change issues rather than the innovation (whether purely pedagogical or tech-based) itself. It’s not technology, it’s people. One graphic in particular that I use is based on the notion that while Moore presented a chasm in the technology adoption curve describing solutions moving across the chasm to reach majority markets, a bigger issue is that we will always have innovators, early adopters, majority and laggard groups in education, with a constant flux of teaching and learning innovations. Therefore the issue is straddling the chasm, helping both sides.

    When Michael and I gave a keynote at last month’s OpenEd conference, the always interesting Alan Levine pointed out via Twitter (and referencing a blog post of his) that this perspective reminded him of one he read years ago and rediscovered in 2014. I found the article (and the author, I think), and it is a fascinating read that shows just how strong the pattern of innovation in ed tech is. The 1994 article could be written today with just a few changes to examples used. (more…)

  • Exclusive: University of Phoenix moving from homegrown platform to Blackboard Learn Ultra

    The University of Phoenix has a history of using its scale to develop and rely on homegrown platforms, including the  adaptive learning platform branded as “Classroom”. I wrote about this investment in 2013.

    The full significance of the University of Phoenix bet on adaptive learning platforms goes beyond pure dollars and became clear when the school announced the closure of 115 of its 240 locations. The stated usage of the savings from campus closures is primarily to further invest in the platform as described by the Phoenix Business Journal.

    In early 2015 the University of Phoenix experienced “significant disruption with respect to our new online classroom platform”. By summer, the university’s parent company The Apollo Group announced to investors that it planned “to move away from certain proprietary and legacy IT systems”. CEO Greg Cappelli further described these changes in broad terms in the most recent earnings call. (more…)

  • Moodle Moves Give Hints of What a Post-Fork World Could Look Like

    Phil and I have written about the growing tension between the interests of Moodle HQ and a those of a couple of the bigger Moodle Partners, most notably Blackboard. There are a number of ways that this tension could be resolved, but one of the more dramatic possibilities would be a fork of Moodle. While we are not predicting it will happen, a couple of developments hit the wires last week that give us some idea of what the world might look like if there were a real and permanent split between the two groups.

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