e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Courseware in Context

  • In “EdTech”, “Ed” comes before “Tech”: A National Louis University/Acrobatiq Case Study

    A few weeks ago, I posted about our case study on the governance of the Courseware in Context (CWiC) Framework. CWiC is a laudable effort to take the traditional product evaluation matrix and get beyond “magic quadrant-ism” by adding some educational context to the selection process. Which product is “best” depends a lot on your goals, capabilities, and other contextual factors. The CWiC advisory committee members explain how hard it is to integrate these factors into a product evaluation matrix. A lot of the hoped-for value of CWiC is still aspirational. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s good to have big goals and to recognize how close to (or far from) achieving them you really are.

    Sometimes just seeing your path to achieving those big aspirations is hard in and of itself. As this next case study shows, even if CWiC realizes its potential, it’s never going to be the right place to start if your goal is to meaningfully impact student outcomes and close achievement gaps. Our original goal with the National Louis University (NLU) and Acrobatiq interviews was to look at what it takes to implement courseware effectively with a vendor partner once the selection is made. In other words, what happens after you go through the process that the CWiC framework is meant to support. But we got so much more than that because NLU has been incredibly thoughtful about the program and students—the context—that impacts the use and value of the courseware. In other words, they also modeled what universities need to do before they select courseware, from designing a business/sustainability model that enables them to provide appropriate cost of an education to thinking about educational goals to figuring out where courseware does and doesn’t fit into that overall model. All of that prework has a profound impact on the working relationship with the vendor partner, the kinds of support identified as necessary to make the courseware work, and the future vision for how to continue to broaden and deepen the impact.

    In the end, I think this case study shows both that a tremendous amount of work is needed to integrate courseware if you truly want to drive improvement in student outcomes and that the significant amount of planning and implementation work involved is only a small percentage of the total necessary program planning and work required. NLU has effectively redesigned the entire undergraduate experience. Their partnership with Acrobatiq works in large part because Acrobatiq understands their role in NLU’s larger goals, and because NLU maintains their focus on those goals rather than getting caught up in the notion that buying some magic product will solve all their problems.

    (https://youtu.be/Iau4QaezReo)

    (https://youtu.be/rJtc53dXQbI)

    (https://youtu.be/R7xv7QRJ5R4)

    I’m proud to have this be the final case study in this series of grant-funded stories. It neatly reflects a lot of what we believe about the ways in which universities and vendors need to work together if we want to improve higher education.

  • The CWiC Framework: Context around Courseware

    Update: I got feedback that it wasn’t clear the embedded video was a three-video playlist, so I have broken them out individually.

    We have a new case study up in which we interview members of the Courseware in Context (CWiC) framework advisory committee about their work:

     

    The focus isn’t so much on the framework itself as on the project goals and, somewhat less directly, it’s sustainability model. We’ve seen repeated failures in the market to create selection tools for curricular materials or edtech products. (Some of us are old enough to remember EduTools.) The committee members are very thoughtful about the missing element, which is context. There are, in CWiC advisory committee member Tanya Joosten’s words, “a million” different contextual variables, from classroom implementation to support to individual student needs. CWiC is an attempt to take a traditional product selection tool model and enrich it enough to account for all these contextual variables.

    The committee members seem acutely aware of how big of a challenge this could be, which is part of what makes these interviews so interesting. At our recent Empirical Educator Project summit, René Kizilcec (whose research we have featured here on e-Literate) made a fascinating comment, which is that we education “desperately needs” a “science of context.” The CWiC folks are trying infuse the output we currently have from the beginnings of that science into what is essentially a tool for selection and procurement. Will it work? I don’t know. The committee members are pretty clear about the size of the challenge. But it’s the right direction.

    The Empirical Educator Project (EEP) attempts to take on the other side of René’s phrase. What would it mean to have a science of context? Who would the scientists be? What cultural institutions would we need to form a consensus around what a science of context would look like such that people who care about it could cooperate on it more effectively, and such that it would attract the funding it needs to be carried out? What business process support tools, including but not limited to procurement tools, do we need to implement a science of context, and how would implementation provide input back to the scientific research? These are the questions that EEP attempts to answer. Will it work? I don’t know. But I feel confident that it’s the right direction.