In a letter to campus leaders, Cal State University system office last month announced that Cal State Online will no longer operate as originally conceived. Emphasis added below. As the CSU continues to expand its online education strategies, Cal State Online will evolve as a critical component. An early Cal State Online goal will continue: […]
Blackboard’s Big News that Nobody Noticed
This week was both D2L’s FUSION conference and Blackboard’s BbWorld. The conventional wisdom going around is that there was no big news out of either conference. In Blackboard’s case, that’s just not true. In fact, there was an astonishing amount of very significant news. It’s just that Blackboard didn’t do a very good job of […]
NPR and Missed (Course) Signals
Anya Kamenetz has a piece up on NPR about learning analytics, highlighting Purdue’s Course Signals as its centerpiece. She does a good job of introducing the topic to a general audience and raising some relevant ethical questions. But she missed one of the biggest ethical questions surrounding Purdue’s product—namely, that some of its research claims […]
A response to Bloomberg article on UCLA student fees
Megan McArdle has an article that was published in Bloomberg this week about the growth of student fees. The setup of the article was based on a new “$4 student fee to pay for better concerts”. To solve this problem, UCLA is introducing a $4 student fee to pay for better concerts. That illuminates a […]
Blackboard’s Perceptis Acquisition Offers Clues into Company’s Strategy
Yesterday Blackboard announced that they acquired Perceptis, a provider of help desk and financial aid support services for colleges and universities. In and of itself, this is not a huge acquisition. Perceptis has 33 clients, offers services that Blackboard was already offering, and has no substantial new technology. But as we approach BbWorld next week, […]
Roundtable Discussion on Integrative Education July 9th at 2pm EDT
Tomorrow, July 9th at 2:00pm EDT, I’ll join a great cast to discuss Reinvent the University for the Whole Person: Principles Driving Policy, and I hope many of you can watch. The other participants: Randy Bass (Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University) Martha Kanter (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Higher Education […]
Instructure’s CTO Joel Dehlin Abruptly Resigns
One week after the conclusion of Instructure’s Users’ Conference, CTO Joel Dehlin abruptly resigned from the company for a new job. Joel took the CTO job with Instructure in summer 2013, around the same time as Devlin Daley’s departure (Devlin was co-founder). Joel’s resignation comes as a surprise, especially given his prominent placement as the technology lead for […]