e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: e-Literate TV

  • Response to Robert Talbert: Pedagogical change is difficult, many need support

    On Monday Robert Talbert, associate professor at Grand Valley State University and author of the Casting Out Nines blog, wrote a provocative and important post titled “Active learning as an ethical issue”. Robert noted:

    The recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study stands out among these recent studies. It is a meta-study of 225 prior studies on active learning, and the results are bracing: students in these studies who were in classes focused on lecture and direct instruction in the classroom were 55% more likely to fail their courses than their counterparts in active learning focused classes, and scored almost half a standard deviation lower than their active learning counterparts on exams.

    This sentence from the PNAS study stopped me in my tracks when I first read it:

    “If the experiments analyzed here had been conducted as randomized controlled trials of medical interventions, they may have been stopped for benefit—meaning that enrolling patients in the control condition might be discontinued because the treatment being tested was clearly more beneficial.”

    Robert’s central point is that active learning should be thought of as an ethical issue, where it could be considered unethical to withhold treatment. He then asks why faculty might withhold active learning and listed four reasons: self-preservation, laziness, a weird and irrational superiority complex, and legitimate external forces (such as overly controlling school structure).

    The argument is an interesting and compelling one based on the study, and it is worth reading the whole article and his follow-up post. I wish we treated teaching and learning more often as an ethical issue,but I would add one additional reason that the active learning treatment is not more prevalent. This one comes from our discussions with faculty and support staff as part of our e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, and Michael and I summarized the point in the introduction episode. (more…)

  • Release of Analysis Episode for e-Literate TV Series on Personalized Learning

    Today we are thrilled to release the the final episode in our new e-Literate TV series on “personalized learning”. In this series, we examine how that term, which is heavily marketed but poorly defined, is implemented on the ground at a variety of colleges and universities. While today’s episode is the final one released due to its analysis of what we learned in the five case studies, it was designed to be used as an introduction to the series.

    We have deliberately held back from providing a lot of analysis and commentary within each case study – letting faculty, students, administrators and staff speak for themselves – but in today’s episode we share some of the key lessons we learned. We had a variety schools profiled in the series, and our analysis addresses the commonalities and differences that we saw. You can see the analysis episode at this link or in the embed below.

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    Introduction: What Did We Learn In Our Personalized Learning Series?

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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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Challenge Of Student Transition Between Active And Passive Learning Models

    Last week the Hechinger Report profiled an innovative charter school in San Diego called High Tech High (insert surfer jokes here) that follows an active, project based learning (PBL) model. The school doesn’t use textbooks, and they don’t base the curriculum on testing. The question they ask is whether this approach prepares students for college.

    As a result, for [former HTH student Grace] Shefcik, college – with its large classes and lecture-based materials– came as a bit of a shock at first. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is one of more than 15,000 undergraduates, her assignments now usually consist of essays and exams. At High Tech High, Shefcik had just 127 students in her graduating class, allowing her to form close relationships with peers and teachers.

    The premise of the article is that PBL prepares students for life but maybe not for college. Grace described the big difference between high school, with constant feedback and encouragement, to college, where you rarely get feedback. Other students describe their frustration in not knowing how to study for tests once they get to college.

    After a recent screening of “Most Likely to Succeed” at the New Schools Summit in Burlingame, California, High Tech High CEO Larry Rosenstock told an audience, “We actually find that many of our students find themselves bored when they get to college.” (more…)

  • ED and CBE: Example of higher ed “structural barrier to change” that is out of institutions’ control

    There has been a great conversation going on in the comments to my recent post “Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes” on too many relevant issues to summarize (really, go read the ongoing comment thread). They mostly center on the institution and faculty reward system, yet those are not the only sources of structural barriers to change that lead institutions to this “difficulty adopting their own changes”. Increasingly there are outside forces that both encourage change and resist change, and it is important to recognize the impact of the entire higher education ecosystem.

    Yesterday Amy Laitinen from New America wrote an excellent article titled “Whatever Happened to the Department’s Competency-Based Education Experiments?” highlighting just such an example.

    About this time two years ago, President Obama went on his college affordability bus tour and unveiled his plan to take on the rising costs of higher education in front of thousands of students at SUNY Buffalo. Promoting innovation and competition was a key part of his plan and President Obama held up competency-based education (CBE) up as one of the “innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank.” The President touted Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America CBE approach. The university “gives course credit based on how well students master the material, not just on how many hours they spend in the classroom,” he explained. “So the idea would be if you’re learning the material faster, you can finish faster, which means you pay less and you save money.” This earned applause from students in the audience as well as from CBE practitioners around the country. [snip]

    The problem is that day was nearly two years ago and the CBE experimental sites are not yet off the ground. (more…)

  • Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes

    George Siemens made an excellent point in his recent blog post after his White House meeting.

    I’m getting exceptionally irritated with the narrative of higher education is broken and universities haven’t changed. This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the “disrupt and transform” learning crowd. Universities are exceptional at innovating and changing.

    While I agree with his primary point about false narratives with simplistic no-change assumptions, I think there is a risk about going too far the other direction. Universities have certainly changed, and there are many innovations within universities, but universities are not very good about diffusing the innovations that they do make. I made this same argument here and here. ((The first article had more of a technology focus, but the same applies to the pedagogical side of change.)) Campus changes are apparent, but too often I see innovative course designs showing real results, but courses in the same department remain unchanged.

    In my opinion Universities are exceptional at innovating, but they are not exceptional at changing.
    (more…)