Phil started his last post with the following: I’m not sure which is more surprising – Instructure’s continued growth with no major hiccups or their competitors’ inability after a half-decade to understand and accept what is at its core a very simple strategy. Personally, I vote for Door #1. As surprising as the competition’s seeming sense […]
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.
Instructure: Accelerating growth in 3 parallel markets
I’m not sure which is more surprising – Instructure’s continued growth with no major hiccups or their competitors’ inability after a half-decade to understand and accept what is at its core a very simple strategy. Despite Canvas LMS winning far more new higher ed and K-12 customers than any other vendor, I still hear competitors claim that schools […]
Promising Research Results On Specific Forms Of Adaptive Learning / ITS
Recently I described an unpublished study by Dragan Gasevic and team on the use of Knowillage / LeaP adaptive platform.1 The context of article was on D2L’s misuse of the results, but the study itself is interesting in terms of its findings that adaptive learning usage (specifically LeaP in addition to Moodle within an Intro […]
Unizin One Year Later: View of contract reveals . . . nothing of substance
I’ve been meaning to write an update post on Unizin, as we broke the story here at e-Literate in May 2014 and Unizin went public a month later. It’s one year later, and we still have the most expensive method to get the Canvas LMS. There are also plans for a Content Relay and Analytics Relay as seen […]
The Importance Of Student Control Of Learning, Especially For Working Adults
When giving keynotes at conferences over the past two years, I have observed that some of the best non-verbal feedback occurs when pointing out that personalized and adaptive learning does not equal black-box algorithms choosing content for students. Yes, there are plenty of approaches pitching that solution (Knewton in its early state being the best-known if not […]
D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims
Update 5/17/16: I made a mistake in my math on the UW Milwaukee improvements. The number of A’s and B’s increased 163% increased 220% for “unprepared” students and 170% for “prepared” students. I apologize for the error. Update 7/23: Read this blog post for D2L admission of mistakes and changes to claims. At this point I’d say that […]
U of Phoenix: Losing hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptive-learning LMS bet
It would be interesting to read (or write) a post mortem on this project some day. Two and a half years ago I wrote a post describing the University of Phoenix investment of a billion dollars on new IT infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a new, adaptive-learning LMS. In another post I […]