I recently attended the ALMAP Summer Meeting. ALMAP is a program funded by the Gates Foundation, with the goals described in this RFP webinar presentation from March 2013: We believe that well implemented personalized & adaptive learning has the potential to dramatically improve student outcomes Our strategy to accelerate the adoption of Adaptive Learning in higher education […]
Fall 2012 US Distance Education Enrollment: Now viewable by each state
Starting in late 2013, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) started providing preliminary data for the Fall 2012 term that for the first time includes online education. Using Tableau (thanks to Justin Menard for prompting me to use this), we can now see a profile of online education in the US for degree-granting […]
Is the DOE backing down on proposed State Authorization regulations?
Now witness the firepower of this fully written and delivered WCET / UPCEA /Sloan-C letter! – D. Poulin One of the policies that we’re tracking at e-Literate is the proposed State Authorization regulation that the US Department of Education (DOE) has been pushing. The latest DOE language represents a dramatic increase in federal control of distance education […]
WWW-based online education turns 20 this summer
I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t gotten any press, but Internet-based online education turns 20 this summer. There were previous distance education programs that used networks of one form or another as the medium (e.g. University of Phoenix established its “online campus” in 1989), but the real breakthrough is the use of the world wide […]
Coursera shifts focus from ‘impact on learners’ to ‘reach of universities’
Richard Levin, the new CEO of Coursera, is getting quite clear about the new goals for the company. At first glance the changes might seem semantic in nature, but I believe the semantics are revealing. Consider this interview with the Washington Post that was published today in the Washington Post [emphasis added in both cases below]: Richard […]
“Personalized Learning” Is Redundant
Dan Meyer has just published a provocative post called “Don’t Personalize Learning,” inspired by an even more provocative post with the same title by Benjamin Riley (as well as being a follow-up to Meyer’s post “Tools for Socialized Instruction not Individualized Instruction“). Part of the confound here is sloppy terminology. Specifically, I think the term “personalized learning” […]
InstructureCon: Canvas LMS has different competition now
For the first few years of the Canvas LMS, Instructure’s core message was ‘Canvas is better than Blackboard’. This positioning was thinly veiled in the company’s 2011 spoof of the Apple / 1984 commercial and even hitting the level of gloating in a company blog commenting on Blackboard’s strategy reversal in 2012. Instructure made their name by being […]