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.

  • Coursera blocked in Iran due to human grading and discussion forums?

    Update: I just received confirmation from a Coursera spokesperson that the description of facts about Coursera’s block of student access in this and my previous blog post is accurate. They cannot comment on the rest of the professor’s statement nor on Udacity and edX.

    Yesterday I wrote about Coursera having to block access to its courses from students in Iran, Syria, Cuba and Sudan. Kris Olds covered this subject in more detail this morning as did Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed. The nub of the issue is that the US government (the State Department I believe) has declared MOOCs as educational services rather than information or informational materials, and thus the courses are subject to US embargoes of the four countries in question.

    According to IHE, Udacity “has not received official word about enrolling students in countries subject to economic sanctions”, and EdX has a license to operate in Iran, Syria and Cuba. So the issue is mostly with Coursera, although not by their decision.

    If a recent post from a Coursera instructor is accurate, we may now know what triggered the classification of MOOCs as a a service subject to sanctions. I was notified by a trusted reader that Ebrahim Afsah from the University of Copenhagen (yes, the same one from the story about abusive discussion forum posts) send a message this afternoon to all students in his MOOC “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” (registration required). He quotes a message from Coursera to MOOC instructors that includes the new information [emphasis added].

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  • Blackboard seems to have cut large amount of workforce

    Update: Please see new post with updated information.

    Update: I heard back from the company that part of the discrepancy in numbers is that public statements about employee count may have changed in whether they included the call center employees (which vary seasonally). If I can get some hard numbers from Blackboard, I will publish a new post with more accurate information. For now, please note that the 26% number may be based on inconsistent definitions. Accordingly, I have changed the post title and am bumping this post.

    The Washington Post ran a piece over the weekend about Blackboard’s reorganization efforts since Jay Bhatt took over as CEO.

    Blackboard has upended its corporate structure and strategy behind closed doors since chief executive Jay Bhatt took over the private company a year ago with a mandate to reinvigorate one of the District’s oldest and most recognized technology brands.

    The changes come after years of eroding market share for Blackboard, a pioneer in online learning management software. Bhatt said the changes made in the past year provide a foundation on which to grow the business.

    Michael and I have both noted some of the layoffs that have taken place as well as the reorganization and removal of silos. Alert former employee George Kroner, however, noted on Twitter just how significant the layoffs have been. This nugget from the WaPo story is the key:

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 2,200 employees to date.

    Compare this to the first story on company layoffs from September 2012, from Bill Flook at the Washington Business Journal. Note that Michael Chasen was still CEO at this point, as Jay Bhatt took over at the end of December 2012.

    In a statement, Blackboard spokesman Matthew Maurer said the company has “seen strong growth this year in terms of revenue and in the acquisition of new businesses that have opened up new markets for us.” The company’s total workforce now stands at 3,000 globally, “even with the recent elimination of a small number of roles,” he said.

    That is a significant change, if these stories are accurate, going from 3,000 employees to 2,200 in less than 18 months – a reduction of more than 26% of the workforce [see update above].

    I’m sure that not all of these losses have come from layoffs, as a fairly significant number of employees have likely left of their own volition. This is fairly typical within companies making such significant changes, however.

    For now, it’s worth noting that there are big changes happening at the two biggest commercial LMS providers (Desire2Learn recently laid off 7% of its workforce).

  • Coursera and Udacity, but not edX, blocked in Syria and Iran

    One of the most-cited aspects of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is their openness – anyone can access the courses with just Internet access and and email address. But this openness might not be valid in all countries based on recent actions.

    The media site Wamda, which focuses on supporting entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, has a story out today describing how Coursera and Udacity MOOCs have apparently been blocked in Syria and Iran [see update below on Syria].

    Just over six months ago, online education platform Coursera thanked a Syrian doctor for a poignant blog post that spoke directly to its mission to change the world by educating the masses. [snip]

    Yet today, Dr. Angrimi no longer has that lifeline, as Coursera appears to have blocked Syrian IPs since Friday.

    “Our system indicates that you are attempting to access the Coursera site from an IP address associated with a country currently subject to U.S. economic and trade sanctions. In order for Coursera to comply with U.S. export controls, we cannot allow you access to the site.”

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  • Twice as many institutions as previously reported have no online courses

    Recently I pointed out that the widely-quoted Babson survey on online learning estimates 7.1 million US higher ed students taking at least one online course while the new IPEDS data indicates the number as 5.5 million. After looking deeper at the data, it appears that the difference in institutions (whether or not an institution offers any online courses) is even greater than the difference in students. This institutional profile is important, as the Babson report (p. 13) noted that institutions offering no online courses had very different answers than others, a theme that ran through much of the report: [emphasis added]

    The results for 2013 represent a marked change from the pattern of responses observed in previous years. In the past, all institutions have consistently shown a similar pattern of change over time. Different groups of institutions typically reported the same direction of change – if one group noted an improvement on a particular index, all other groups would show a similar degree of improvement. The overall level of agreement with a particular statement might vary among different groups, but the pattern of change over time would be similar. This is not the case for 2013.

    As noted above, there was a year-to-year change in the overall pattern of opinions on the strategic importance of online education, and on the relative learning outcomes of online instruction, as compared to face-to-face instruction. In both cases, the historic pattern of continued improvement took a step back for 2013, and all of the changes are accounted for in a single group of institutions: those that do not have any online offerings.

    Institutions with no online offerings represent a small minority of higher education – how are they different?

    Let’s look at the IPEDS data on institutions versus the Babson data, first by institutional control. I took the data on page 32 of the Babson report and recreated the graph, then I ran the same analysis using IPEDS data. (NOTE: these interactive charts do not come through on RSS feeds, so you probably will have to click through to post to see.) (more…)

  • Gen Ed and Competency-Based Education

    Inside Higher Ed has a write-up today on an effort by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to develop a competency-based framework for general education called General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), funded by a multi-million-dollar Gates Foundation grant. I am honored to report that I have been invited to participate on one of the GEMs committees.

    To be honest, I have mixed feelings about competency-based education (CBE). On the one hand, I do think that an earnest attempt to have a norming conversation and set some standards for what we hope students will learn at college is very important and badly overdue. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to apply CBE in a mechanistic and reductive way that ignores the important but hard-to-measure skills precisely because they’re hard to measure. It’s essentially the same worry that a number of readers expressed in the comments on my post about Pearson’s efficacy initiative. That said, AAC&U has a good shot at assembling the right stakeholders to grapple with this complexity appropriately. I do think there are models out there. For example, ASU’s Habitable Worlds class, which is both competency-based and mastery-based, is not at all dumbed down and could even be further expanded to include writing and similar open-ended analytic and communications skills. (I interviewed Habitable Worlds co-creator Ariel Anbar last year.) But there are many challenges.

    Anyway, the first meeting of the GEMs group is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know what I think after spending a couple of days talking about the issues with the working group.

  • New IPEDS Data: A graphical view of online ed by state and by sector

    Update: I should have guessed this, but the visualizations don’t come through on RSS feeds, so you’ll need to click through to the article.

    Reader Mike Himmelstein has rightly pointed out that our analysis of the new IPEDS data would benefit from using visualization tools instead of just tables. This comment led me to a multi-day investigation of which data visualization tool would best integrate into a WordPress blog while maintaining interactive data exploration. I tried MicroStrategy (great tool but cannot share without login), IBM Many Eyes (good public tool but limited in formatting), and several variations of Google Charts (not as rich in features as MicroStrategy, but close, and supports public sharing). In the end I’ve ended up using the Visualizer plugin to display Google Charts. All data below is for degree-granting institutions.

    Let’s first look at the state-by-state data in a Geochart. This data tracks online ed in public higher ed institutions as of Fall 2012. I’m showing the data broken out by undergraduate and graduate students. The color scale is based on the percentage of students taking at least one online course, but if you hover over a state you can also see the percentage of students taking all of their courses online.

    For the basic data combining undergraduate and graduate students in a table format, see this post.

    Percentage of Public Higher Ed Undergrad Students Taking Online Courses, by State
    [visualizer id=”4711″]

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  • Clarification: No, there aren’t 7.1 million students in US taking at least one online class

    I’ve written several posts recently looking at the new IPEDS data on distance education (for the most part equivalent to online education). In one post I pointed out [emphasis added]:

    Previously, the best data available on total student counts came from the Babson Survey Research Group with their annual survey (prior to 2012 called the Sloan survey). This is the survey tracking the total number of students taking at least one course online. When I talked to the researchers earlier this year, they mentioned that they hoped the new IPEDS data would ‘put them out of business’. I hope this comment was half in jest, as their survey measures much more information than just total student counts and they have very useful longitudinal data. I have asked BSRG for an updated statement on their plans but have not been able to get a response yet.

    Some additional notes on the data:

    According to the IPEDS data, 5.5 million (26%) degree-seeking students in the US took at least one online course in Fall 2012, which is significantly less than that reported by Babson (6.7 million / 32% for Fall 2011 data). Keep in mind the different methodologies involved – IPEDS collects data reported directly from colleges and universities, while Babson is based on a representative survey; IPEDS measures “distance education”, while Babson measures “online courses”. I would look forward to this year’s Babson survey to explain the differences, but for now, I’ll just note the difference.

    The new Babson Survey came out yesterday morning, and I was disappointed to find out that they did not address or acknowledge the differences in the data. With the new survey data (p. 15, using Fall 2012 data just like IPED), they came to a dramatically different conclusion [emphasis added]:

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