e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: adaptive learning

  • Courseware Without A Silver Bullet: Focusing on faculty enablement

    Courseware Without A Silver Bullet: Focusing on faculty enablement

    In a 2016 post on “Personalized Learning vs. Adaptive Learning”, Michael contrasted the former as a set of technology-enabled teaching practices with the latter as a project label [emphasis added].

    On the other hand, adaptive learning is a label that applies to products. Further, adaptive learning products can support all of the practice areas of personalized learning. They enable teachers to move content broadcast outside of class time, they make homework time into contact time through analytics, and they provide some tutoring function. “Adaptive” tends to provoke a lot of discussion around the latter of the three practice areas. See the piece I wrote for the American Federation of Teachers if you want a primer on the strengths and limitations of adaptive learning products as tutors. But as often as not the first two capabilities, neither of which is dependent on adaptive algorithms, are the ones that enable the biggest gains in personalized learning teaching practices. “Courseware” is a set of products that, when designed well and used properly, can enable faculty to move content broadcast out of the classroom and make homework time content time. Adaptive courseware adds the tutoring element while also, if done well, increasing the value of that homework contact time by providing better feedback through more targeted analytics.

    One problem, of course, is that many advocates end up presenting adaptive learning as a silver bullet, focusing on supposed magical tutoring capabilities and ignoring the messy but valuable work of enabling faculty to improve their own courses. As we will see, it is not a safe assumption that all vendors like this label or set of assumptions.

    In the first episode of this series we explored the challenge of going beyond pilots and deploying systems at scale. In the second episode we explored the importance of increased visibility as an important benefit of course redesign. In this episode we explore the challenge of silver bullets – what happens when a company has no intention of being labeled as “adaptive learning” but has been described that way? Realizeit is not the only company dealing with this same issue, and it is important for educators to understand how a company defines itself and the problems their products are designed to solve. ((This post is not meant to endorse Realizeit’s platform over other companies’ platforms. We are focusing on institutional perspectives and lessons to be learned. Realizeit is one of our sponsors of the Empirical Educator Project.))

    (source: https://youtu.be/xPWBoMhP_yU)

    This post is part of our e-Literate TV series, which is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions (or views) contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

  • Understanding Learning Science and Its Value to Educators

    Understanding Learning Science and Its Value to Educators

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    In a world where we are constantly barraged with product claims about “learning science,” most educators have very little sense of what that really means and how it is relevant to what they do. I was lucky enough to be able to hear from and interview some actual academic learning sciences last year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Simon Initiative. The trip itself was paid for by CMU—I was part of a group of “media fellows”—and the video production was paid for by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The result was a trio of interview videos that I’m particularly pleased to share. (more…)

  • Chan/Zuckerberg: The “Tech” is not the Hard Part in “Ed Tech”

    Phil and I were recently interviewed by KQED’s Sarah Tan for a story about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Summit platform. As often happens when our comments are just one bit of a larger story—particularly when we are asked to provide a more critical external perspective as a check on the enthusiastic reports of a project’s participants—some interesting parts of the interview conversation inevitably ended up on the cutting room floor. Ms. Tan was kind enough to grant us permission to repurpose some of the source material from the interview for this blog post.

    To be clear, Phil and I have no direct experience with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and have only seen the publicly available information on the Summit platform that it has released (although we both took some time to review that information carefully in advance of the interview). The value of the conversation snippet we provide here is in answering the questions, “Even if you think an ed tech platform seems well designed and the creators seem well intentioned, why might it fail anyway? And while we’re at it, how should we even define success?” These are questions that rarely get asked and answered clearly in discussions about ed tech, including in much ed tech research.

    (more…)

  • Vendor Roles in Fostering Educational Literacies

    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. Now that the mission of higher education is more about educating everyone to the benefit of everyone, having skills to help students achieve their potential should be a core competency of every teaching faculty member. That includes learning some very old skills that K12 teachers have known for ages. It also includes learning new skills that will support the growth and application of the nascent learning sciences. When I made an analogy to 19th-Century medicine in the last post, that wasn’t casual. Where we are in 21st-Century learning sciences bears a striking resemblance. We are discovering some important basic science but are barely beginning the process of figuring out how those discoveries should influence our practice. Advancing more quickly on that front will require more than a handful of data scientists working in labs. It will require the proliferation of skilled educator/clinicians who can help advance our understanding of the ways in which theory interacts with the real world of practice.

    This transformation of academia, at both the individual and institutional levels, must be driven by educators, not by vendors. But vendors can serve critical support and enabling functions, there were found wonderful vendors at advantage-properties.com whom where able to assist all concerns and meet all the expectations that clients had. In our weird role as paid and unpaid marriage counselors between universities and vendors, Phil and I get the privilege of seeing how both sides of this potential partnership are grappling with these changes both separately and in partnership. I believe that many of the most successful ed tech companies of the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to support educators in making this professional transformation. There will be many different ways to do this. I’m going to write about one example of a company grappling with this challenge today and will write about more in the future.

    (more…)

  • Teaching Using Adaptive Learning

    The entire six-part interview series with McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive learning experts is now up on YouTube. (Full disclosure: In the months between the filming and the publication of these videos, McGraw-Hill became a client of MindWires.) Here’s a good segment on teaching:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSqoc6Y_4No)

    The first example Matt Haldeman gives is a math class, which is where we see adaptive learning used the most. The interesting part of it is how he describes the change in the teacher’s classroom activities. This is a critical aspect this often isn’t picked up when these products are used in higher ed math classes—particularly outside of developmental math.

    The second example is a history class, which is a less (stereo)typical example. The focus is on class preparation. In other words, the adaptive platform helps students come to class knowing what you hope they’ll know but often haven’t really absorbed from a reading assignment that is meant to give them the raw materials they need for an interesting class discussion on a topic.

    Here’s the whole series, if you want to all six segments in order:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o&list=PLb2UcU-aVjN2aPSmGKILK2GHh6MgGswM9)

  • McGraw-Hill Education’s Perspective on Adaptive Learning

    Last spring, I had the opportunity to interview some of the top folks on McGraw-Hill Education’s (MHE’s) digital team to get their view on adaptive learning. Between ALEKS, LearnSmart, and SmartBooks, they have the developed the most well articulated adaptive strategy of any of the big publishers, under the leadership of Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster. And on a personal note, Al Essa, their Vice President of Research and Data Science, has been a friend since the days when he was CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and he and both were working on an open source LMS project. (Al also helped with analysis of the Blackboard patent back when he was at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and ran a simulation giving some matheatical rigour to Mike Caulfield’s intuition that some of Purdue University’s Course Signals research was off.) So I was interested to hear what MHE’s digital team had to say about the role of adaptive learning in the classroom, what learning science does and doesn’t tell us, and other related topics.

    For reasons that aren’t worth going into, this video sat in the can waiting to go into post-production for about six months. Here, finally, is the first segment in what will be a series produced from the interview:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o)

    More of the interview will be coming soon.

    Full disclosure: In the intervening months between when this video was shot and now, MHE became a client of MindWires.

  • Explainer Video on Flipped Class, Learning Analytics, and Adaptive Learning

    We now have the second of our personalized learning explainer videos out. As a reminder, here’s the first one, which reframes personalized learning as a set of approaches for addressing the teaching problems of reaching hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/8wDw33NLuT0)

    The new one starts to talk about the how, giving flipped class, learning analytics, and adaptive learning as examples of tools or approaches that can help teachers reach those hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/USAHX56lWqE)

    Some folks continue to be confused about just how these things are supposed to help. We described some of our thinking in our original post on the first explainer and our recent piece in Inside Higher Ed. We are well aware of a number of hard limits on what we can accomplish, including but not limited to the following:

    • A couple of 3-minute videos are not going to change the world all by themselves.
    • The levers and barriers for change are different at different institutions.
    • Vendors are going to be out selling, the press is going to be out hyping, and institutional stakeholders are going to be looking for silver bullets no matter what.

    But we also find ourselves in the fortunate position of having some credibility with academic administrators, ed tech advocates, and vendors. If we can help our readers to nudge the inevitable and already ongoing conversations about courseware products in a more healthy direction, away from robot tutors in the sky and toward enabling teaching practices that reach more students, that would be a good thing. We’re creating these explainers as tools that can be used by any of the parties to those conversations to reframe the discussion. If we’re lucky, we’ll influence the ways in which the vendors pitch these products in the first place while also preparing educators to take advantage of the different pitch to ask more educationally relevant questions and nudge the procurement process in a healthier direction. We won’t always be so lucky. But we won’t always be unlucky either. A lot comes down to each of you and what you can accomplish in your respective contexts. We’re just trying to give you a few more tools to work with. You’re the change agents.