Speaking of efficacy and the complexity of measuring it, I had an interesting conversation the other day with Danae Hudson, a professor of Psychology at Missouri State University, about a course redesign effort that she participated in. The initial contact came from a P.R. firm hired by Pearson. Phil and I get a lot of […]
Efficacy Math is Hard
David Wiley has a great post up on efficacy and OER in response to my original post about Pearson’s efficacy plan. He opens the piece by writing about Benjamin Bloom’s famous “2 sigma” problem: The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to drastically increasing learning. The two-part problem is that we don’t know how […]
Clarifications on UF Online Payments to Pearson Embanet
I wrote a post over the weekend that included information from the Gainesville Sun about the University of Florida Online (UF Online) program and its expected payments to Pearson Embanet. Chris Newfield from Remaking the University also wrote on the subject today. Chris raises some very important issues in his post, including his point: Universities […]
Embanet and 2U: More financial insight into Online Service Providers
While I have written recently about UF Online and 2U, there is actually very little insight into the operations and finances of the market segment for Online Service Providers (OSP, also known as School-as-a-Service, Online Program Management). Thanks to 2U going public yesterday and the Gainesville Sun doing investigative work on UF Online, we have […]
Two-Year Anniversary of Blackboard Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot
Two years ago today, Blackboard made a dramatic change of course with a series of public announcements: Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers — Moodlerooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia (although they had different business models). Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which helps “institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems […]
Coursera and edX Hire New Executives: What about online experience?
Today’s big news is the concurrent change in leadership at two of the big three MOOC providers. First, Coursera announced they had hired Richard Levin, former president of Yale University, to be the company’s new CEO. Besides being a big-name college executive, Levin also led (or at least was president during) the development of Open […]
Why VCs Usually Get Ed Tech Wrong
I don’t often get to write these words, but there is a new must-read blog post on educational technology by a venture capitalist. Rethink Education’s Matt Greenfield argues that there is no generalized bubble in ed tech investment; rather, the problem is that the venture community has a habit of systematically betting on the wrong […]