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.

  • Combining MOOC Student Patterns Graphic with Stanford Analysis

    In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared a description of five student patterns emerging from open-enrollment MOOCs (excluding those with an associated student fee) based on anecdotal data.  In part 4 I compared the overall course completion pattern against an MIT study of the first edX MOOC, leading to some validation of the general shape of when participants drop out.

    Combined MOOC patterns

    The model and typology has gained traction recently, being referenced in both the Government of Ontario’s  environmental scan and literature review [pp 32-33, 40] as well as the British government’s The Maturing of the MOOC literature review [pp 26-28]. So that means it’s time to update and keep people on their toes.

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  • Digging into the Purdue Course Signals Results

    Update: Mike has written another post clarifying the intuitions behind his math.

    The spectacular Mike Caulfield casts a skeptical eye on the Course Signals data:

    Only a portion of Purdue’s classes are Course Signals classes, so the chance any course a freshman takes is a Course Signals course can be expressed as a percentage, say 25%. In an overly dramatic simplification of this model, a freshman who takes four classes the first semester and drops out has a has about a 16% chance of having taken two Course Signals courses (as always, beware my math here, but I think I’m right). Meanwhile they have a 74% chance of having taken 1 or fewer, and a 42% chance of having taken exactly one.

    What about about a student who does *not* drop out first semester, and takes a full load of five courses each semester? Well, the chance of that student having two or more Course Signals courses is 75%. That’s right — just by taking a full load of classes and not dropping out first semester you’re likely to be tagged as a CS 2+ student.

    In other words, each class you take is like an additional coin flip. A lot of what Course Signals “analysis” is measuring is how many classes students are taking.

    Are there predictions this model makes that we can test? Absolutely. As we saw in the above example, at a 25% CS adoption rate, the median dropout has a 42% chance of having taken exactly one CS course. So it’s quite normal for a dropout to have had a CS course. But early on in the program the adoption rate would have much lower. What are the odds of a first semester dropout having a CS course in those early pilots? For the sake of argument let’s say adoption at that point was 5%. In that case, the chance our 4-course semester drop out would have exactly one CS course drops from 42% to 17%. In other words, as adoption grows having had one course in CS will cease to be a useful predictor of first to second-year persistence.

    Is that what we see? Assuming adoption grew between 2007 and 2009, that’s *exactly* what we see.

    I’d like to see somebody at Purdue (or Ellucian) respond to the questions that Mike raises. Matt Pistilli, are you listening?

  • Lack of online course evaluation leads to accreditation warning

    ACCJC, the accrediting commission behind the City College of San Francisco crisis, issued an warning to Honolulu Community College in February of this year, with a report required by October 15. As described in Hawai’i News Now:

    Honolulu Community College has been placed on warning accreditation status by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, the only of the University of Hawaii’s ten campuses to get such a warning.

    The accrediting panel gave the 4,400-student campus the warning after an evaluation visit to the Kalihi school last fall.

    What is interesting in this action is that one of the primary drivers of the warning was HCC’s lack of evaluation of the effectiveness of their online courses versus the comparable face-to-face courses.

    More than 100 HCC faculty members teach courses online and that’s where the accreditation panel leveled its most serious criticism.

    “The college should compare the instructional quality of face-to-face and distance education courses and develop a strategic plan for distance education,” the accrediting panel wrote.

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  • Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week

    In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of  edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses online through Coursera.

    First the MIT news from Inside Higher Ed (see the Chronicle for additional coverage):

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will this fall package some of its online courses into more cohesive sequences, just as edX prepares to roll out certificates of completion using identity verification. Seen together, the two announcements may provide a glimpse at what the future holds for the massive open online course provider.

    The “XSeries” sequences add a new layer of structure to MITx, the institution’s section of the edX platform. The first of seven courses in the Foundations of Computer Science XSeries will be offered this fall, with one or more new courses being rolled out each semester until the fall of 2015. The Supply Chain Management XSeries, consisting of three courses, will begin in the fall of 2014. The two sequences will target undergraduates and working professionals, respectively. [snip]

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  • Layoffs and reorganization at Blackboard

    Bill Flook, who covers the DC technology scene for Business Journals, just interviewed Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt about last week’s layoff. The full article can be found here. From a quick read, it looks like Blackboard is executing on two key priorities:

    • Trimming the fat caused by years of acquisitions and redundant operations; and
    • Completing the acquisitions by centralizing core functions, particularly under new management.

    From the article:

    Blackboard Inc. carried out a round of layoffs last week as part of a broader reorganization by CEO Jay Bhatt, the latest in a string of actions aimed at revitalizing the 16-year-old ed-tech behemoth.

    Bhatt, in an interview Tuesday evening, confirmed the job cuts, which he described as “a very small action we took to take some costs out of the business, primarily on things that don’t allow us to get where we need to go.” He declined to specify the number of layoffs.

    As for the priority of trimming the fat, it is now fairly clear that Blackboard is not set to divest any major product lines, but rather will follow a path of centralization. The new management team is a key part of the reorganization plans.

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  • MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?

    Robert McGuire wrote an article for Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, that touches on an important topic – is the centralized discussion forum a barrier to student engagement?

    But more students can also mean more isolation within the crowd. “Online classes can be really lonely places for students if they don’t feel like there’s a community,” notes Maria Andersen, director of learning and research at Instructure, which runs Canvas Network, an open repository where participating schools can deliver their own MOOCs.

    Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them. Discussion forums are the number one complaint by readers and contributors of MOOC News and Reviews, an online publication devoted to critiquing individual MOOC courses and the evolving MOOC landscape. Most MOOC discussion forums have dozens of indistinguishable threads and offer no way to link between related topics or to other discussions outside the platform. Often, they can’t easily be sorted by topic, keyword, or author. As a result, conversations have little chance of picking up steam, and community is more often stifled than encouraged.

    There are several studies that appear to show that MOOC discussion forums have few students participating and that the forums are dominated by a small number of students.

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  • More Blogging on Automated Essay Grading

    Sometime guest blogger and friend of e-Literate Elijah Mayfield has another great post up on using machine learning tools in the service of improving student writing over at his company blog. However you may feel about the technology, the exploration that he’s doing raises some important question about what good feedback on writing is. This aspect of educational technology—the fact that it forces us to examine our tacit knowledge of teaching and make it explicit—is one of the things that I value most about the field.

    Give it a read.