Late last week I described the new plan from the US Department of Education (ED) and their Office of Educational Technology (OET) to “call for better methods for evaluating educational apps”. Essentially the ED is seeking proposals for new ed tech evaluation methods so that they can share the results with schools – helping them […]
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.
US Department of Education: Almost a good idea on ed tech evaluation
Richard Culatta from the US Department of Education (DOE, ED, never sure of proper acronym) wrote a Medium post today describing a new ED initiative to evaluate ed tech app effectiveness. As increasingly more apps and digital tools for education become available, families and teachers are rightly asking how they can know if an app actually […]
68 Percent of Statistics Are Meaningless, Purdue University Edition
Purdue University has been happy to take credit for essentially inventing the retention early warning analytics category. But are they willing to take responsibility for putting out a flawed efficacy study? Eh, not so much.
Challenge Of Student Transition Between Active And Passive Learning Models
Last week the Hechinger Report profiled an innovative charter school in San Diego called High Tech High (insert surfer jokes here) that follows an active, project based learning (PBL) model. The school doesn’t use textbooks, and they don’t base the curriculum on testing. The question they ask is whether this approach prepares students for college. […]
Reuters: Instructure has filed for IPO later this year
Reuters is on a breaking news roll lately with ed tech. This time it is about Instructure filing for an initial public offering (IPO). Instructure is planning an initial public offering later this year that could value the education software company at $500 million to $800 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Instructure, based […]
Blackboard Acquires Large Latin American Moodle Provider
In my first post-BbWorld blog post, I noted that the international market is hugely important for Blackboard and Moodle is hugely important for their international strategy. Nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue and much of their growth comes from their international business, where they seem to be way ahead of their main North American […]
ED and CBE: Example of higher ed “structural barrier to change” that is out of institutions’ control
There has been a great conversation going on in the comments to my recent post “Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes” on too many relevant issues to summarize (really, go read the ongoing comment thread). They mostly center on the institution and faculty reward system, yet those are not the only sources of […]