The 20 Million Minds Foundation is starting a new blog, and for topics of mutual interest, Michael and I will be posting articles several times a month on their site and occasionally cross-posting here. The first article of mine went up last week. Two Approaches to Watch in Remedial Education Innovation It is no secret that the […]
New e-Literate TV Episode: Adaptive Learning and Learning Analytics
In our latest episode, the penultimate in the pilot series, we explore the topics that are likely to be moving up the curve of the hype cycle this year—adaptive learning and learning analytics. Like many of the topics in the pilot series, we could have made an entire series about this one. (And maybe we […]
Outcomes-Based Education and the Conservative Radicalism of the AAC&U
I have been invited to participate on the Digital Working Group of the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U’s) General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) program. (As we will see, AAC&U loves its acronyms.) GEMs is a really interesting project made even more interesting because of who is doing it. AAC&U is a fundamentally […]
New e-Literate TV Episode – CourseWare: What Comes After the Textbook
We’ve just published our fourth episode in the e-Literate TV pilot series. This one is about CourseWare. Frequent e-Literate readers will know that this is a topic Phil and I think is important and growing in importance. You’re most likely to have heard of the products from the big publishers—Pearson’s CourseConnect, McGraw Hill’s SmartBooks, Cengage’s […]
New e-Literate TV Episode: MOOC Mania
We have just published our third episode in the first ETV series—an interview with Stanford University’s Amy Collier about MOOCs. As is often the case with these episode, there are lots of different angles we could have taken. This episode is really the answer to a colleague who asks, “What is this thing that Tom […]
edX forced to block access to students in Cuba, Iran and Sudan
In late January I wrote here and here about the US Treasury Department, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), blocking access to Coursera courses by students in Syria, Cuba, Iran and Sudan (also see Kris Olds article here and IHE article here). The reason for the decision appears to be that MOOCs were classified […]
A response to New Yorker article on ‘A MOOC Mystery’
The New Yorker published an article yesterday titled “A MOOC Mystery: Where Do Online Students Go?” which tried to explain low MOOC completion rates by comparing the situation to the General Educational Development (GED) exam. Right off the bat, the article conflates MOOCs with “online students”. MOOCs are but one form of online education, and […]