It is almost exactly the six-month anniversary of the Empirical Educator Project’s (EEP’s) first annual summit at Stanford University. The thesis behind EEP is simple: We believe that one of the biggest barriers to increasing student access and success in US higher education is a failure to communicate. We see substantial innovation and progress happening […]
Carnegie Mellon University
Understanding Learning Science and Its Value to Educators
We interviewed real, live learning scientists from Carnegie Mellon University to get a better sense of what’s real and how the research can impact classroom teaching. And you know what? They weren’t scary at all!
No, really, courseware is a thing now
In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially […]
The Need For Learning Engineers (and Learning Engineering)
Editor’s Note: I am pleased to announce that Bill has agreed to continue contributing blog posts from time to time. Therefore, he is now officially a “Featured Blogger” rather than a “Guest Blogger.” Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at a workshop on online graduate education. At that workshop, Carnegie Mellon University Provost and Executive Vice President Dr. […]
Please Welcome Featured Blogger Elijah Mayfield
When the story first broke a while back about the Kaggle contest for robo-grading essays that could be “similar to” human graders, I got interested. So after doing a little reading, I ended up contacting a guy by the name of Elijah Mayfield, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the winners […]
Apollo Group’s Technology Investments
I had an unexpected opportunity to chat with the Apollo Group’s Rob Wrubel last week. Rob is their Chief Innovation Officers and Executive Vice President. It was a short conversation—only fifteen minutes—but boy, was it dense with information.
Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)
No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple […]