In my last post, I talked about the need for educators in general and faculty in particular to develop literacy around data and analytics. But it’s really broader than that. Back when college was intended for a relatively small percentage of the population, the idea of “weeding out” students who couldn’t make it without help was not obviously out of alignment with its mission.
UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses
Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course.1 The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie […]
University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes
After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar […]
Analytics Literacy is a Major Limiter of Ed Tech Growth
Whatever else you think of the election, it has been the mother of all teachable moments for many of us. It has raised questions about what we thought we knew about our democracy, our neighbors, our media…and apparently learning analytics. The shock of the polls being “wrong” has raised a lot of questions about how much we can really trust data analytics.
From Cockroaches To Miniature Elephants: Webinars on Not Your Mother’s Old LMS
We just finished the third of our three-part webinar series on“The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”, hosted by our friends at NobleStream. In the first discussion, Michael and I laid out our vision for why we are analysts for the LMS market and what we hope to achieve, capped off by Michael’s […]
Recommended Reading: Times Higher Education (THE) Reports on Student Views of Blended Learning
Citing in-house research that surveyed over 100,000 students in the United States, THE reported late last week (see article) that students in exclusively face to face courses and students in exclusively online courses tended to give higher marks to their programs than those students taking blended courses that combine face to face learning with online […]
Webinars: California OEI on institutional view of LMS decisions, Ray Henderson on vendor view
We have now had 2 of our 3 webinars (or colloquiums) with NobleStream organized around “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”. In our first webinar, Howard Weiner from NobleStream interviewed Michael and me about the work we do as consultants and market analysts. Video available here. In the second webinar, we had Pat […]