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.

  • Desire2Learn Analytics Follow-up

    A few weeks back, when blogging about Desire2Learn’s new Student Success System retention early warning analytics product, I wrote,

    From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)…

    I’m going to try to talk to some D2L clients who are actually using this product next week when Phil and I are at D2L FUSION.

    And then the other day, describing my overall impressions of the FUSION conference, I wrote,

    Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers….On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on….

    [T]he point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.

    It turns out that analytics is a perfect example the overall problems I described in the latter post: good product vision, serious technical implementation problems that have been understated and probably underestimated, and relatively new technical managers that seem to have some hope of getting the issues straightened out.

    (more…)

  • MOOC Mania: Stanford AI Course Creates Media Sensation Two Years Ago

    It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president’s cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic.

    Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011. I have not included ed tech blogs in this list, but it is worth noting that George Siemens wrote about the new MOOC on August 4 – exactly two years ago.

    And the rest, for better or worse, is history. Let me know if I’ve missed any key articles in this time frame, and I’ll update.

  • Hello? Pedagogy?

    With all the hype about massive and adaptive and big data, it’s hard to remember sometimes that real flesh and blood humans do know some things about teaching and learning. In fact, we know a lot about it in some areas. We’re just not very good at disseminating and deploying it effectively across our educational systems. Massive and adaptive and big data could help solve those problems to the degree that the people behind them would pay close attention to what humans already know. But more often than not, they are not paying attention. Or they have picked up on some little sliver, such as the role of repetition in long-term memory formation, and built a whole product around it. In general, educational experts are brought in as occasional consultants and best, and ignored altogether at worst.

    That is why I find this critique of Sal Khan’s videos by Christopher Danielson, a math and math education teacher at a community college, so refreshing and important. This is not snarky, “Mystery  Teacher Theatre 2000” stuff. Nor is it a hysterical rant on why computers could NEVER replace teachers. Rather, it is a careful, research-backed analysis of what’s wrong with one aspect of Sal Khan’s math videos, with the explicit goal of helping Khan to improve the value of his work. This is incredibly good stuff. And as a bonus, Danielson demonstrates just how easy it is to use a social network like Twitter to get help from a community of educators.

    We really need to figure out how to get better at inviting this kind of dialogue. We shouldn’t just rely on the Christopher Danielsons of the world to beat on the doors of the great tech temples until somebody can be bothered to answer.

  • Great Post on Machine Learning and Essay Grading

    Vik Paruchuri, the author of the edX automated essay grading component, has a great (and lengthy) post up that, in part, responds to Elijah Mayfield’s post on the edX announcement. There’s a good discussion going on in comments, too.

    We need more posts like this one. I’m happy to see the experts in this field working hard to demystify the tools.

  • Desire 2 Improve

    Phil and I spent some time at Desire2Learn’s FUSION conference the other week, and it was an interesting experience. D2L had a couple of first-ever “analyst days” in which we and a few others got some intensive briefings on their products and strategies. (D2L isn’t the only company that is doing this sort of thing, but they’ve gone significantly further with it than the other LMS companies have so far.) It was a useful complement to the information that we get from walking the floor and talking to customers. And, as I’m sure they intended, we walked away from the experience feeling somewhat more positive about the company than we did going in—not so much because of the dog-and-pony show but because we were able to ask some hard questions to senior managers and, more often than not, get reasonable answers.

    Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers. These factors contribute significantly to their very high customer retention rate, even relative to the other LMS providers which, as a group, generally have fairly high retention rates. On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on. CEO John Baker, whose deeply ingrained sense of optimism enabled him to face down a patent lawsuit against serious odds, can be the worst offender in this regard. He is chronically overly optimistic about the state of the company’s products and the seriousness of any bumps in the road.

    In the last year or two, D2L has begun hiring some outsiders to bolster their technical team. They have benefitted from the hot tech market in Kitchener in general and to the collapse of RIM in particular, snapping up relatively senior Blackberry technical people. But it’s fair to say that they have been actively recruiting tech talent, both inside and outside of Kitchener, for a while now. For example, they hired Al Essa, whom I have known for over a decade since his time as CEO of MIT’s Sloan School of Business and his leadership in the dotLRN open source LMS community, to head up their analytics product line.

    It’s hard to tell for certain whether this hiring trend has accelerated since D2L received their investment, but it certainly appears like that might be the case. I’ll call out the example of Nick Oddson, the new VP of Enterprise Product Engineering, who came from OpenText (a serious enterprise content management company that you probably have never heard of). Nick impressed both Phil and me as a guy who knows his stuff and is a straight shooter about what the company is doing well and what it is not doing well yet. At some point we expect to write more about what Nick in particular is up to, because we think it’s pretty pivotal for the future of the company. For now, the point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.

    I’ll have a follow-up post specifically on their analytics products fairly soon.

  • New Post at WCET: Update on California Online Initiatives

    I have a new post up at WCET with updates on the California Online Initiatives driven by state government, including today’s news that SB520 is on hold.

    The big news today is that the controversial bill seeking to allow for-credit partially-outsourced online education in California has been put on hold until at least 2014. [snip]

    On the surface, it appears that higher education insiders might have defeated state government efforts to take a leading role in online initiatives. SB520 is on hold and possibly dead, and most conditions on the additional funding have been removed.

    If you look under the surface, however, the outcome is not as clear. It turns out that the systems are in fact changing their priorities and investing in online to help matriculated students complete degrees at a lower cost, which was the original goal of state government leaders.

    There’s more information there, including news on the University of California’s and California State University’s two new online initiatives.

  • ELI Podcast: Emerging Issues Around MOOCs

    Michael and I were interviewed by Veronica Diaz for the EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) podcast series. The theme was looking not at where MOOCs are today, but at where MOOCs might go in the future. The interview is about 13 minutes in length and covers questions such as:

    • Coursera just raised $43m of funding – what potential do investors see in MOOCs?
    • Based on recent Forbes article – do you see MOOCs as replacing parts of traditional higher ed?
    • Will growing numbers of online students reduce hesitation of employers to hire online students? How does this affect institutions being proxies for quality?
    • What applications are there for MOOCs beyond academic programs? (with interesting answer from Michael based on DS106)

    You can access the podcast on iTunes under the EDUCAUSE channel (just search ‘educause’ and go to episode 18), through the EDUCAUSE site, or by the link below.