e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: David-Wiley

  • Some Notes On Lumen Learning’s $3.75 million Funding Round Led By Follett

    Some Notes On Lumen Learning’s $3.75 million Funding Round Led By Follett

    Today’s biggest ed tech news was Lumen Learning – co-founded by David Wiley and Kim Thanos and focused on getting deeper adoption of OER in higher education – and their new round of funding. And this news goes beyond pure investment, as Follett, the large campus retailer that “serve[s] over half of the students in the United States, and work with 80,000 schools as a leading provider of education technology, services and print and digital content”, led the funding round.

    First up a disclosure: Lumen Learning is a client of MindWires (the consulting side of e-Literate, or our capitalistic alter ego), and we have had a consulting relationship with Lumen for almost 18 months. We mostly don’t blog about our consulting work, and I do not plan to describe our advice to them, but we are not neutral observers on this one.

    As described in the press release:

    Follett will offer Lumen Learning’s OER solutions to more than 1,200 colleges and universities where Follett manages course materials delivery. Given Follett’s ongoing mission to improve access and affordability for students, the company has invested in Lumen Learning to help fund future growth and expansion of OER courseware.

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  • Empowering Students in Open Research

    Phil and I will be writing a twice-monthly column for the Chronicle’s new Re:Learning section. In my inaugural column, “Muy Loco Parentis,” I write about how schools make data privacy decisions on behalf of the students that the students wouldn’t make for themselves, and that may even be net harmful for the students. In contrast to the ways in which other campus policies have evolved, there is still very much a default paternalistic position regarding data.

    But the one example that I didn’t cover in my piece happens to be the one that inspired it in the first place. A few months back at the OpenEd conference, I heard a presentation from CMU’s Norm Bier about that challenges of getting different schools to submit OLI student data to a common database for academic research. Basically, every school that wants to do this has to go through its own IRB process, and every IRB is different. Since the faculty using the OLI products usually aren’t engaged in the research themselves, it generally isn’t worth the hassle to go through this process, so the data doesn’t get submitted and the research doesn’t get done. Note that Pearson and McGraw Hill do not have this problem; if they want to look at student performance in a learning application across various schools, they can. Easily. Something is wrong with this picture. I proposed in Norm’s session that maybe students could be given an option to openly publish their data. Maybe that would get around the restrictions. David Wiley, who does a lot more academic research than I do, seemed to think this wasn’t a crazy idea, so I’ve been gnawing on the problem since then.

    I have talked to a bunch of researchers about the idea. The first reaction is often skepticism. IRB is not so easy to circumvent (for good reason). What generally changed their minds was the following thought experiment:

    • Suppose that, in some educational software program, there was a button labeled “Export.” Students could click the button and export their data in some suitably anonymized format. (Yes, yes, it is impossible to fully de-identify data, but let’s posit “reasonably anonymized” as assessed by a community of data scientists.) Would giving students the option to export their data to any server of their choosing trigger the requirement for IRB review? [Answer: No.]
    • Suppose the export button offered a choice to export to CMU’s research server. Would giving students that option trigger the requirement for IRB review? [Answer: Probably not.]

    There are two shades of gray here that are complications. First, researchers worry about the data bias that comes from opt in. And the further you lead students down the path toward encouraging them to share their data, such as making sharing the default, the more the uneasiness sets in. Second and relatedly, there is the issue of informed consent. There was a general feeling that, even if you get around IRB review, there is still a strong ethical obligation to do more than just pay lip service to informed consent. You need to really educate students on the potential consequences of sharing their data.

    That’s all fair. I don’t claim that there is a silver bullet. But the thought experiment is revealing. Our intuitions, and therefore our policies, about student data privacy are strongly paternalistic in an academic context but shift pretty quickly once the institutional role fades and the student’s individual choice is foregrounded. I think this is an idea worth exploring further.

  • Data To Back Up Concerns Of Textbook Expenditures By First-Generation Students

    David Wiley has added to the conversation ((My initial post, Mike Caulfield response, Bracken Mosbacker, my response to Mike, Mike follow-up)) over use of data on college textbook pricing and student spending patterns with “The Practical Cost of Textbooks”. The key argument is to go beyond prices and spending and look at the most direct measure of asking students themselves how textbooks costs have impacted them. He then looks at the Florida Virtual Campus surveys (also included in my post), concluding:

    What impact does the cost of textbooks have on students? Textbook costs cause students to occasionally or frequently take fewer courses (35% of students), to drop or withdraw from courses (24%), and to earn either poor or failing grades (26%). Regardless of whether you have historically preferred the College Board number or the student survey number, a third fact that is beyond dispute is that surveys of students indicate that the cost of textbooks negatively impacts their learning (grades) and negatively impacts their time to graduation (drops, withdraws, and credits).

    And yes, we need to do something about it.

    Amen. Surveying over 18,000 students, the FVC surveys are quite important and should be on everyone’s radar.

    More Out Of Data

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  • The Fraught Interaction Design of Personalized Learning Products

    David Wiley has a really interesting post up about Lumen Learning’s new personalized learning platform. Here’s an excerpt:

    A typical high-level approach to personalization might include:

    • building up an internal model of what a student knows and can do,
    • algorithmically interrogating that model, and
    • providing the learner with a unique set of learning experiences based on the system’s analysis of the student model

    Our thinking about personalization started here. But as we spoke to faculty and students, and pondered what we heard from them and what we have read in the literature, we began to see several problems with this approach. One in particular stood out:

    There is no active role for the learner in this “personalized” experience. These systems reduce all the richness and complexity of deciding what a learner should be doing to – sometimes literally – a “Next” button. As these systems painstakingly work to learn how each student learns, the individual students lose out on the opportunity to learn this for themselves. Continued use of a system like this seems likely to create dependency in learners, as they stop stretching their metacognitive muscles and defer all decisions about what, when, and how long to study to The Machine.

    Instructure’s Jared Stein really likes Lumen’s approach, writing,

    So much work in predictive analytics and adaptive learning seeks to relieve people from the time-consuming work of individual diagnosis and remediation — that’s a two-edged sword: Using technology to increase efficiency can too easily sacrifice humanness — if you’re not deliberate in the design and usage of the technology. This topic came up quickly amongst the #DigPedNetwork group when Jim Groom and I chatted about closed/open learning environments earlier this month, suggesting that we haven’t fully explored this dilemma as educators or educational technologist.

    I would add that I have seen very little evidence that either instructors or students place a high value on the adaptivity of these products. Phil and I have talked to a wide range of folks using these products, both in our work on the e-Literate TV case studies and in our general work as analysts. There is a lot of interest in the kind of meta-cognitive dashboarding that David is describing. There is little interest in, and in some cases active hostility toward, adaptivity. For example, Essex County College is using McGraw Hill’s ALEKS, which has one of the more sophisticated adaptive learning approaches on the market. But when we talked to faculty and staff there, the aspects of the program that they highlighted as most useful were a lot more mundane, e.g.,

    It’s important for students to spend the time, right? I mean learning takes time, and it’s hard work. Asking students to keep time diaries is a very difficult ask, but when they’re working in an online platform, the platform keeps track of their time. So, on the first class day of the week, that’s goal-setting day. How many hours are you going to spend working on your math? How many topics are you planning to master? How many classes are you not going to be absent from?

    I mean these are pretty simple goals, and then we give them a couple goals that they can just write whatever they feel like. And I’ve had students write, “I want to come to class with more energy,” and other such goals. And then, because we’ve got technology as our content delivery system, at the end of the week I can tell them, in a very efficient fashion that doesn’t take up a lot of my time, “You met your time goal, you met your topic goal,” or, “You approached it,” or, “You didn’t.”

    So one of the most valuable functions of this system in this context is to reflect back to the students what they have done in terms that make sense to them and are relevant to the students’ self-selected learning goals. The measures are fairly crude—time on task, number of topics covered, and so on—and there is no adaptivity necessary at all.

    But I also think that David’s post hints at some of the complexity of the design challenges with these products.

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  • A Weird but True Fact about Textbook Publishers and OER

    As I was perusing David Kernohan’s notes on Larry Lessig’s keynote at the OpenEd conference, one statement leapt out at me:

    Could the department of labour require that new education content commissioned ($100m) be CC-BY? There was a clause (124) that suggested that the government should check that no commercial content should exist in these spaces. Was argued down. But we were “Not important” enough to be defeated.

    It is absolutely true that textbook publishers do not currently see OER as a major threat. But here’s a weird thing that is also true:

    These days, many textbook publishers like OER.

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  • OER and the Future of Knewton

    Jose Ferriera, the CEO of Knewton, recently published a piece on edSurge arguing that scaling OER cannot “break the textbook industry” because, according to him, it has low production values, no instructional design, and is not enterprise grade. Unsurprisingly, David Wiley disagrees. I also disagree, but for somewhat different reasons than David’s.

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  • Efficacy Math is Hard

    David Wiley has a great post up on efficacy and OER in response to my original post about Pearson’s efficacy plan. He opens the piece by writing about Benjamin Bloom’s famous “2 sigma” problem:

    The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to drastically increasing learning. The two-part problem is that we don’t know how to drastically increase learning while holding cost constant. Many people have sought to create and publish “grand challenges” in education, but to my mind none will ever be more elegant than Bloom’s from 30 years ago:

    “If the research on the 2 sigma problem yields practical methods – which the average teacher or school faculty can learn in a brief period of time and use with little more cost or time than conventional instruction – it would be an educational contribution of the greatest magnitude.” (p. 6; emphasis in original)

    So the conversation can’t focus on efficacy only – if there were no other constraints, we actually know how to do “effective.” But there are other constraints to consider, and to limit our discussions to efficacy is to remain in the ethereal imaginary realm where cost doesn’t matter. And cost matters greatly.

    David then launches into a discussion of what he calls his “golden ratio,” or standard deviations per dollar. I have long been a fan of this formulation and quote it frequently. I’m not going to try to summarize his explication of it in his post; you really should go read it. But I would like to tease out a few implications here.

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