Long-time readers know that I have had a close affiliation with the Sakai Foundation at teams and served on the Board of Directors relatively recently. This year, Sakai merged with the Jasig Foundation to form the Apereo Foundation. The purpose of the new organization is to become a sort of Apache Foundation of higher education […]
Competency-Based Education: An (Updated) Primer for Today’s Online Market
There has been a significant amount of progress and interest in competency-based education, as Wisconsin has launched its Flexible Option program, federal legislators are pushing the concept, ‘patient zero’ has graduated from College for America, and resistance is emerging to the concept. I thought it might be useful to update and re-share the primer that […]
Purdue University Has an Ethics Problem
It’s fair to say that Purdue University has sparked several important conversations in ed tech through their work on Course Signals. First, they pretty much put the retention early warning system as a product category on the map, conducting ground-breaking research and building a system that several major ed tech players have either licensed or […]
The quiet revolution in college pricing effects
Douglas Belkin wrote an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal based on a study from Moody’s Investors Service. The lede of the article is that “nearly half of the nation’s colleges and universities are no longer generating enough tuition revenue to keep pace with inflation”, which comes from Moody’s interest in institutional financial stability, […]
Patent Troll Sues Blackboard for Patent Infringement
A company called Sampo IP, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of patent troll Marathon Patent Group, is suing Blackboard for patent infringement. The patents in question appear to be incredibly broad and have also been asserted against Salesforce as well as high-profile customers of collaboration companies Jive, Hyperoffice, and Rally, including Dell, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Aetna, […]
Comments from a Researcher on the Course Signals Kerfluffle
Doug Clow of the Open University has published a thoughtful and detailed blog post in response to the Course Signals effectiveness controversy. He covers far too much ground for me to attempt to summarize here, but I think there are some common themes emerging from the commentary so far: The concerns over the one study have […]
Purdue Course Signals Data Issue Explainer
The “Course Signals” story originally covered here has recently gone international, with Britain’s prestigious Times Higher Education magazine picking up the Inside Higher Ed story and publishing it as an “Editor’s Pick”. Hopefully this will push the Course Signals team to answer questions asked of them nearly two months ago, questions that have still not been satisfactorily […]