e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Carnegie Mellon University

  • The Empirical Educator Project’s First Public Collaboration

    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 across the sector, from individual classrooms to entire university systems, from access-oriented institutions to research universities to vendors of all shapes and sizes. But for a variety of reasons, the lessons being learned rarely travel far. We believed that if we could just get the right people talking to each other and sharing their work with each other, then good things would happen.

    That’s it. It was that simple.

    Six months ago, we tried it for the first time with about 50 hand-picked people for one and a half days. Most people there knew less than half the people in the room. That was one of our goals; we wanted to get people talking across the normal boundaries of their peer (or customer, or competitor) groups.

    Early indications are that we succeeded beyond our wildest hopes. The group generated somewhere between 15 and 20 project collaboration ideas, many of which have been active even over the summer months. We haven’t written much about the ongoing work because we’ve been waiting for the participants to feel they have made enough progress on their respective projects that they are ready to talk about them publicly.

    Today, I am happy to tell you about the first EEP collaboration that has crossed that threshold. Here’s the text of an announcement from James Madison University’s (JMU’s) department of Psychology:

    JMU faculty associated with the Assessment & Measurement PhD program and the Center for Assessment and Research Studies have formed a strategic partnership with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University to assess educational effectiveness. Drs Sara Finney and Keston Fulcher began this partnership with CMU when meeting Dr. Marsha Lovett at the Empirical Educators Project meeting at Stanford in February 2018.

    Since that time, JMU faculty member Dr. Jeanne Horst traveled to CMU to engage in training offered by the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation in June 2018. During the 2.5 day Teaching As Research Institute, Dr. Horst engaged in conversation about evidence-based teaching and learning practices. She and the CMU professionals shared experiences regarding the process of developing and implementing intentional curriculum and instruction in higher education and assessing its effectiveness.

    In July 2018, JMU hosted our CMU colleagues Mike Melville and Elizabeth Whiteman for training offered during JMU’s week-long national award-winning Assessment 101. During this training, JMU faculty and graduate students offer practice-orientated materials and build skills regarding student learning outcomes assessment.

    In August 2018, Dr. Marsha Lovett traveled to JMU to observe JMU’s large-scale Assessment Day. In addition to learning about how to plan, proctor, and engage students during institutional accountability testing, Dr. Lovett also observed a focus group to elicit students’ perceptions of general education courses. She also met with JMU faculty and graduate students to plan the next steps in our strategic partnership. JMU faculty look forward to sharing our expertise in assessment and measurement with CMU faculty while gaining additional knowledge and skills associated with creating and implementing evidenced-based programming from the experts (and our friends) at CMU.

    JMU and CMU are about half a day’s drive from each other. They are both (underrated) top-tier universities. Each has particular areas of strength in applied learning science research that complements the other’s. And yet, they didn’t know about each other until they met at EEP. That one meeting was all it took to trigger three rather substantial reciprocal campus visits—one in June, one in July, and one in August—to learn from each other and to develop what JMU is now publicly characterizing as a “strategic partnership.”

    The EEP network has quite a few other such pots simmering on the stove that you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months. Not all ideas for joint efforts will bear fruit, and not all EEP participants are engaged in successfully progressing projects yet. We at e-Literate are still learning how to reduce the friction that inhibits successful collaboration. But we are off to a fantastic start, thanks in large part to the amazing folks in our first EEP cohort.

    Here’s an e-Literate TV video of several CMU Simon Initiative and Eberly Center faculty talking about their view of learning science:

    And here’s JMU’s Sara Finney talking about their approach to course and program effectiveness assessment in her lightning talk at the EEP summit:

    Peanut butter, meet chocolate.

    Stay tuned. We’ll have more good stories to share soon.

  • 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…)

  • 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 betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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  • 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. Mark Kamlet used the words “Learning Engineering” in his keynote which I built upon in my talk.  In my previous post I referenced the need of semantic data and algorithms to support learning engineers to create and iteratively improve courses and courseware (among other things).  I felt it was worth taking a little time to describe just what I believe that means.

    For over 10 years, the Open Learning Initiative has been bringing together teams to develop online course materials.  Carnegie Mellon is an ideal place to cultivate this work due to its multi-disciplinary programs and culture aside from its expertise in the related fields.   During that time we’ve built a team of experts that are critical to the building of learning environments informed by research and capable of recording data for iterative improvement as well as creating dynamic reports for stakeholders.

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  • 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 of the contest. The net result of our conversation is that I ended up writing a blog post called “What Is Machine Learning Good For?” Fast-forward a bit. Elijah now has a start-up called LightSIDE Labs based on the same technology, and The New York Times is writing puff pieces on how edX is going to change the world with this technology. In the meantime, I have been talking to Elijah for a while about getting him to write at e-Literate.

    I’m happy to say that Elijah will be doing a series of posts for us on machine learning in education, starting today. Please welcome him.

  • 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.

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  • 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 motivations and maybe because the desire for scale is not something that is polite to talk about due to a certain amount of discomfort with it. But the motivation is definitely there if you look closely, as I’ll get into in a bit.

    The problem is that both of these approaches, in their current incarnations, miss one absolutely critical element of the teaching process. As you can probably guess from all the qualifiers I am using in my language, I don’t think it’s an inherent or permanent failing. But I worry that it’s a failing due to a deep cultural blind spot that we have about what education is, and that it therefore will be challenging to address.

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