Our First Standard of Proof Webinar, on Beating Summer Melt

I am just thrilled to post the archive of our inaugural Standard of Proof webinar:

https://youtu.be/7NoYUa_VHfs

It is a near-perfect encapsulation of everything that the Empirical Educator Project aspires to promote and foster: front-line educators, academic researchers, and commercial vendors working together to measurably increase student success and to do so in a way that is both persuasive in terms of the rigor of evidence and repeatable by other institutions.

As a reminder, Standard of Proof highlights academic collaborations by the Empirical Educator Project’s commercial sponsors with academic researchers and academic practitioners. All projects must either contribute new knowledge to the commons or promote the diffusion of established evidence-backed practices.

In this case, we have a story of a small EdTech start-up—AdmitHub—that has a total of nine randomized controlled trials either completed or in process with academic partner institutions.

Nine.

How many of your EdTech vendors have nine randomized controlled trials either done or in the works? How many have one? How many have you even asked this question? (If you want better answers on the first two questions, then try to improve your answer to the last one.)

They were able to do this, in part, because institutions like Georgia State University had real leaders, like GSU’s Tim Renick, who refused to accept the proposition that disadvantaged students were already beyond help by the time they got to college. Instead, the GSU folks (and their colleagues at other academic institutions conducting research with AdmitHub) set out to study their own practices and identify areas that they were failing students in ways that could be fixed. Using data, with the help of their vendor and an academic researcher—in this case, University of Pittsburgh Professor and summer melt expert Lindsay Page—GSU demonstrated that we can make education better and more equitable. It is the perfect counter-example to the sad situation I described in my post on what I didn’t see at EDUCAUSE.

This is the future that we all should be reaching for, folks. And it is reachable, as all three of my guests made clear. The video is well worth an hour of your time. Standard of Proof webinar production values will improve as we learn our craft, but the conversation quality just doesn’t get much better than this.

We’re actively working on the spring webinar line-up and will have some juicy conversations scheduled by the time you return from your holiday break.

Watch this space.