Following the IHE piece on Essex County College’s struggles to get good outcomes from their personalized learning program in developmental math, and following my blog post on the topic, Phil and I had an interesting exchange about the topic in email with ECC’s Vice President for Planning, Research, and Assessment Doug Walercz. With his permission, I’d like to share some of his observations with you. One of the big takeaways from the conversation, for me, is that our cultural notion of the pedagogical work that happens in a good lecture is pretty impoverished relative to the reality. We don’t have a clear understanding of all the things that a good lecture accomplishes, and therefore we often lose valuable elements of student support when we try to replace it. This has pretty serious implications for MOOCs, flipped classrooms, personalized learning, and a wide array of pedagogical approaches that replace a traditional in-person lecture with something else.
Tag: Doug Walercz
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Personalized Learning is Hard
Paul Fain has written a really good, nuanced article at IHE covering the update that Essex County College gave of their developmental math adaptive learning pilot at a recent conference in Washington, DC. We did a two–part case study on ECC in our e-Literate TV series). The headline results are as follows:
- In the first year, the pass rate was worse than in the traditional classes. (The first semester was “disastrous.”)
- This year—the second year—the pass rate is coming closer to the traditional class but is still underperforming.
- The article seems to imply that students who earn a C in the personalized learning class do better than students who earn a C in the traditional class, but the article is not explicit about that.
There is no magic pill. As Phil and I have been saying all along—most recently in my last post, which mentioned ECC’s use of adaptive learning—the software is, at best, an enabler. It’s the work that the students and teachers do around the software that makes the difference. Or not. In ECC’s case, they are trying to implement a pretty radical change in pedagogy with an at-risk population. It’s worth digging into the details.