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.

  • Release of Empire State College Case Study on e-Literate TV

    Today we are thrilled to release the fourth case study in our new e-Literate TV series on “personalized learning”. In this series, we examine how that term, which is heavily marketed but poorly defined, is implemented on the ground at a variety of colleges and universities.

    We are adding two episodes from Empire State College (ESC), a school that was founded in 1971 as part of the State University of New York. Through a lot of one-on-one, student-faculty interactions, the school was designed to serve the needs of students who don’t do well at traditional colleges. What problems are they trying to solve? How do students view some of the changes? What role does the practice of granting prior-learning assessments (PLA) play in non-traditional students’ education?

    You can see all the case studies (either 2 or 3 per case study) at the series link, and you can access individual episodes below. (more…)

  • 68% of Statistics Are Meaningless, D2L Edition

    Two years ago, I wrote about how D2L’s analytics package looked serious and potentially ground-breaking, but that there were serious architectural issues with the underlying platform that were preventing the product from working properly for customers. Since then, we’ve been looking for signs that the company has dealt with these issues and is ready to deliver something interesting and powerful. And what we’ve seen is…uh…

    …uh…

    Well, the silence has ended. I didn’t get to go to FUSION this year, but I did look at the highlights of the analytics announcements, and they were…

    …they were…

    OK, I’ll be honest. They were incredibly disappointing in almost every way possible, and good examples of a really bad pattern of hype and misdirection that we’ve been seeing from D2L lately.

    (more…)

  • About The D2L Claim Of BrightSpace LeaP And Academic Improvements

    Recently I wrote a post checking up on a claim by D2L that seems to imply that their learning platform leads to measurable improvements in academic performance. The genesis of this thread is a panel discussion at the IMS Global conference where I argued that LMS usage in aggregate has not improved academic performance but is important, or even necessary, infrastructure with a critical role. Unfortunately, I found that D2L’s claim from Lone Star was misleading:

    That’s right – D2L is taking a program where there is no evidence that LMS usage was a primary intervention and using the results to market and strongly suggest that using their LMS can “help schools go beyond simply managing learning to actually improving it”. There is no evidence presented[2] of D2L’s LMS being “foundational” – it happened to be the LMS during the pilot that centered on ECPS usage.

    Subsequently I found a press release at D2L with a claim that appeared to be more rigorous and credible (written in an awful protected web page that prevents select – copy – paste).

    D2L Launches the Next Generation of BrightSpace and Strives to Accelerate the Nation’s Path to 60% Attainment

    D2L, the EdTech company that created Brightspace, today announces the next generation of its learning platform, designed to develop smarter learners and increase graduation rates. By featuring a new faculty user interface (UI) and bringing adaptive learning to the masses, Brightspace is more flexible, smarter, and easier to use. [snip] (more…)

  • An Example Why LMS Should Not Be Only Part of Learning Ecosystem

    In Michael’s initial post on the Post-LMS, he built on this central theme:

    Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind.

    The idea here is not that the traditional LMS has no value (it can be critical infrastructure, particularly for mainstream faculty adoption), but rather that in the future we both see more learning platform designs being tied to specific pedagogies. This idea is quite relevant given the ongoing LMS users’ conferences (InstructureCon last week, D2L Fusion this week, BbWorld next month, Apereo / Sakai as well as iMoot in the past two months).

    Later in the post Michael mentions ASU’s Habitable Worlds as an example of assessing the quality of students’ participation instead of direct grading. (more…)

  • The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One’s Own

    I have been meaning for some time to get around to blogging about the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) paper on a Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) and Tony Bates’ thoughtful response to it. The core concepts behind the NGDLE are that a next-generation digital learning environment should have the following characteristics:

    • Interoperability and Integration
    • Personalization
    • Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
    • Collaboration
    • Accessibility and Universal Design

    The paper also suggests that the system should be modular. They draw heavily on an analogy to LEGOs and make a call for more robust standards. In response, Bates raises three concerns:

    1. He is suspicious of a potentially heavy and bureaucratic standards-making process that is vulnerable to undue corporate influence.
    2. He worries that LEGO is a poor metaphor that suggests an industrialized model.
    3. He is concerned that, taken together, the ELI requirements for an NGDLE will push us further in the direction of computer-driven rather than human-driven classes.

    As it happens, ELI’s vision for NGDLE bears a significant resemblance to a vision that some colleagues and I came up with ten years ago when we were trying to help the SUNY system find an LMS that would fit the needs of all 64 campuses, ((I understand that SUNY has since added a 65th campus)) ranging from small, rural community colleges to R1 universities to medical and ophthalmology schools to a school of fashion. We got pretty deep into thinking about the implementation details, so it’s been on my mind to write my own personal perspective on the answers to Tony’s questions, based in large part on that previous experience. In the meantime, Jim Groom, who has made a transition from working at a university to working full-time at Reclaim Hosting, has written a series of really provocative and, to me, exciting posts on the future of the digital learning environment from his own perspective. Jim shares the starting assumption of the ELI and SUNY that a learning environment should be “learner-centric,” but he has a much more fully developed (and more radical) idea of what that really means, based on his previous work with A Domain of One’s Own. He also, in contrast to the ELI and SUNY teams, does not start from the assumption that “next-generation” means evolving the LMS. Rather, the questions he seems to be asking are “What is minimum amount of technical infrastructure required to create a rich digital learning environment?” and “Of that minimal amount of infrastructure we need, what is the minimal amount that needs to be owned by the institution rather than the learner?” I see these trains of thought emerging his posts on a university API, a personal API, and a syndication bus. What’s exciting to me about these posts is that, even though Jim is starting from a very different set of assumptions, he is also converging on something like the vision we had for SUNY.

    In this post, I’m going to try to respond to both Tony and Jim. One of the challenges of this sort of conversation is that the relationship between the technical architecture and the possibilities it creates for the learners is complex. It’s easy to oversimplify or even conflate the two if we’re not very careful. So one of the things that I’m going to try to do here is untangle the technical talk from the functional talk.

    (more…)

  • Personalized Learning Changes: Effect on instructors and coaches

    Kate Bowles left an interesting comment at my previous post about an ASU episode on e-Literate TV, where I argued that there is a profound change in the instructor role. Her comment:

    Phil, I’m interested to know if you found anything out about the pay rates for coaches v TAs. I’m also interested in what coaches were actually paid to do — how the parameters of their employable hours fit what they ended up doing. Academics are rarely encouraged to think of their work in terms of billable increments, because this would sink the ship. But still I’m curious. Did ASU really just hike up their staffing costs in moving to personalised learning, or was there some other cost efficiency here? If the overall increase in students paid off, how did this happen? I’m grappling with how this worked for ASU in budgetary terms, as the pedagogical gain is so clear.

    This comment happened to coincide with my participation in WCET’s Leadership Summit on Adaptive Learning, where similar subjects were being discussed. For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll use the “personalized learning” language, which includes use of adaptive software as a subset. Let’s first address the ASU-specific questions. (more…)

  • Instructor Replacement vs. Instructor Role Change

    Two weeks ago I wrote a post about faculty members’ perspective on student-centered pacing within a course. What about the changing role of faculty members – how do their lives change with some of the personalized learning approaches?

    In the video below, I spoke with Sue McClure, who teaches a redesigned remedial math course at Arizona State University (ASU) that is based on the use of Khan Academy videos. There are plenty of questions about whether this approach works and is sustainable, but for now let’s just get a first-hand view of how Sue’s role changed in this specific course. You’ll see that it took some prodding to get her to talk about her personal experience, and I did have to reflect back what I was hearing. Note that the “coaches” she described are teaching assistants.

    (more…)