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.

  • Moodle Association: New pay-for-play roadmap input for end users

    As long as we’re on the subject of changes to open source LMS models . . .

    Moodle is in the midst of releasing a fairly significant change to the community with a new not-for-profit entity called the Moodle Association. The idea is to get end users more directly involved in setting the product roadmap, as explained by Martin Dougiamas in this discussion thread and in his recent keynotes (the one below from early March in Germany).

    [After describing new and upcoming features] So that’s the things we have going now, but going back to this – this is the roadmap. Most people agree those things are pretty important right now. That list came from mostly me, getting feedback from many, many, many places. We’ve got the Moots, we’ve got the tracker, we’ve got the community, we’ve got Moodle partners who have many clients (and they collect a lot of feedback from their paying clients). We have all of that, and somehow my job is to synthesize all of that into a roadmap for 30 people to work on. It’s not ideal because there’s a lot, a lot of stuff going on in the community. (more…)

  • Pilots? We don’t need no stinkin’ pilots!

    Timothy Harfield commented on Arizona State University’s approach to pilots and scaling innovation at ASU.

    excellent comment on the problem of scaling innovation in #HigherEd. This is a central concern for @UIAinnovation.

    The University Innovation Alliance is “a consortium of 11 large public research universities committed to making high-quality college degrees accessible to a diverse body of students”. I wrote about this “central concern” last summer in a post titled “Pilots: Too many ed tech innovations stuck in purgatory”, using the frame of Everett Rogers’ Diffusions of Innovations model. While the trigger for that post was on ed tech products, the same situation applies for the course design situation.

    5 Stages of Adoption

    What we are seeing in ed tech in most cases, I would argue, is that for institutions the new ideas (applications, products, services) are stuck the Persuasion stage. There is knowledge and application amongst some early adopters in small-scale pilots, but majority of faculty members either have no knowledge of the pilot or are not persuaded that the idea is to their advantage, and there is little support or structure to get the organization at large (i.e. the majority of faculty for a traditional institution, or perhaps for central academic technology organization) to make a considered decision. It’s important to note that in many cases, the innovation should not be spread to the majority, either due to being a poor solution or even due to organizational dynamics based on how the innovation is introduced.

    The Purgatory of Pilots

    This stuck process ends up as an ed tech purgatory – with promises and potential of the heaven of full institutional adoption with meaningful results to follow, but also with the peril of either never getting out of purgatory or outright rejection over time.

    (more…)

  • NYT Michael Crow Condensed Interview: More Info needed . . . and available

    The New York Times ran an “edited and condensed” interview with Arizona State University (ASU) president Michael Crow, titled “Reshaping Arizona State, and the Public Model”.

    Michael M. Crow sees Arizona State as the model of a public research university that measures itself by inclusivity, not exclusivity. In his 13 years as its president, he has profoundly reshaped the institution — hiring faculty stars from across the country, starting a bevy of interdisciplinary programs, growing the student body to some 83,000 and using technology to bring his ideas to scale, whether with web-based introductory math classes or eAdvisor, which monitors students’ progress toward their major. Last year, Dr. Crow made headlines when the university partnered with Starbucks to offer students the chance to complete their degree online for free. His new book, written with the historian William B. Dabars, is called, appropriately, “Designing the New American University.”

    (more…)

  • Release of ASU Case Study on e-Literate TV

    Today we are thrilled to release the third 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 three episodes from Arizona State University (ASU), a school that is frequently in the news. Rather than just talking about the ASU problems, we are talking with the ASU people involved. What problems are they trying to solve? How do students view some of the changes? Are faculty being replaced by technology or are they changing roles? For that matter, how are faculty members involved in designing some of these changes?

    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…)

  • UF Online and Enrollment Warning Signs

    The University of Florida Online (UF Online) program is one of the highest profile online initiatives to be started over the past few years (alongside other public institution programs such as California’s Online Education Initiative, OpenSUNY, Cal State Online, and Georgia Tech / Udacity). UF Online, which I first described in this blog post, is an exclusively-online baccalaureate program leading to a UF degree for lower costs than the traditional on-campus experience.

    As part of a new program augmenting UF Online, qualified students that are not admitted to the University of Florida due to space constraints can be accepted to UF Online’s PaCE program, although the Washington Post in April called out that these students had not asked to be part of UF Online.

    Some 3,100 students accepted as freshman by the University of Florida for the fall got a big surprise along with their congratulations notices: They were told that the acceptance was contingent on their agreement to spend their first year taking classes online as part of a new program designed to attract more freshmen to the flagship public university.

    The 3,118 applicants accepted this way to the university — above and beyond the approximately 12,000 students offered traditional freshman slots — did not apply to the online program. Nor were they told that there was a chance that they would be accepted with the online caveat. They wound up as part of an admissions experiment.

    Fast forward to this week’s news from the Gainesville Sun. (more…)

  • Worth Considering: Faculty perspective on student-centered pacing

    Over the weekend I wrote a post based on the comment thread at Friday’s Chronicle article on e-Literate TV.

    One key theme coming through from comments at the Chronicle is what I perceive as an unhealthy cynicism that prevents many people from listening to students and faculty on the front lines (the ones taking redesigned courses) on their own merits.

    Sunday’s post highlighted two segments of students describing their experiences with re-designed courses, but we also need to hear directly from faculty. Too often the public discussion of technology-enabled initiatives focus on the technology itself, often assuming that the faculty involved are bystanders or technophiles. But what about the perspectives of faculty members – you know, those who are in the classrooms working with real students – on what challenges they face and what changes are needed from an educational perspective? There is no single perspective from faculty, but we could learn a great deal through their unique, hands on experiences. (more…)