e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: e-Literate TV

  • Worth Considering: Faculty perspective on student-centered pacing

    Over the weekend I wrote a post based on the comment thread at Friday’s Chronicle article on e-Literate TV.

    One key theme coming through from comments at the Chronicle is what I perceive as an unhealthy cynicism that prevents many people from listening to students and faculty on the front lines (the ones taking redesigned courses) on their own merits.

    Sunday’s post highlighted two segments of students describing their experiences with re-designed courses, but we also need to hear directly from faculty. Too often the public discussion of technology-enabled initiatives focus on the technology itself, often assuming that the faculty involved are bystanders or technophiles. But what about the perspectives of faculty members – you know, those who are in the classrooms working with real students – on what challenges they face and what changes are needed from an educational perspective? There is no single perspective from faculty, but we could learn a great deal through their unique, hands on experiences. (more…)

  • Worth Considering: Students can have their own perspectives on edtech initiatives

    Triggered by Friday’s article on e-Literate TV, there have been some very interesting conversations both in the Chronicle comment thread and on the e-Literate TV site. The most, um, intense conversations have centered on the application of self-regulated learning (SRL) in combination with adaptive software (ALEKS) to redesign a remedial math course at Essex County College. Michael has been wading in very deep waters in the comment threads, trying emphasize variations of the following point.

    But that debate should be in the context of what’s actually happening in real classrooms with real students, what the educational results are, and what the teachers and students involved think of their experiences.

    Right now, the “sides” are having a fight–it’s not really a debate because the sides aren’t really talking to each other–in near total absence of any rational, educator-evaluated, evidence-based conversation about what these approaches are good for. One side says they will “fix” a “broken” education system, while the other side says they will “destroy” the education system. Well, what are the students saying?

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  • The ETV Personalized Learning Series: What We Hope It Contributes

    It seems like there has been an avalanche of high-profile books about the future of education lately—Kevin Carey’s The End of College, Jeff Selingo’s College Unbound, Anya Kamenetz’s The Test, Michael Crow’s Designing the New American University, and Fareed Zacharia’s In Defense of a Liberal Education, to name a few. The fact that so many of these books are being written now by high-profile authors and are getting so much attention indicates that there is a sense in the public consciousness that we may be at some sort of inflection point. But it’s possible to read a bunch of these books—whatever their virtues may be—and still have only a cloudy notion of what is actually happening on the ground in classrooms right now, for several reasons. First, many of these books are written by non-educators. Second, it’s hard to paint a complete picture while also marshalling examples to support a thesis about tectonic cultural change. But maybe most importantly, it’s just hard to convey a visceral sense of what’s going on in the day-to-day educational lives of teachers and students with the written word.

    Which is one reason why we’re pretty excited about the release of the first two case studies in our new e-Literate TV series on the trend of so-called “personalized learning.” We see the series as primarily an exercise in journalism. We tried not to hold onto any hypothesis too tightly going in, and we committed to reporting on whatever we found, good or bad. We did look for schools that were being thoughtful about what they were trying to do and worked with them cooperatively, so it was not the kind of journalism that was likely to result in an exposé. We went in search of the current state of the art as practiced in real classrooms, whatever that turned out to be and however well it is working.

    These first case studies set the tone for the series. One is on Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, and the other is on Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey. The wide differences between these two schools is indicative of the kind of breadth that we have aspired to achieve for the whole series. Each case study is 30 minutes of video, broken into 10- to 15-minute segments, very little of which is us talking. (We will be releasing some analysis episodes that bookend the series, but those were filmed last and will come out after all the case studies.) And as we had hoped, each case study yielded some lessons and surprises for us.

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  • Release of e-Literate TV Series on Personalized Learning

    Today we are thrilled to release the initial episodes 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. What does it really mean in practice? What problem is intended to solve? And how well is it working?

    e-LiterateLogoMED

    We have initially released case studies of approximately 30 minutes each from two very different schools – Middlebury College and Essex County College. You can see all the episodes (either 2 or 3 per case study) at the series link, and you can access individual episodes below.

    e-Literate TV, owned and run by MindWires Consulting, is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. When we first talked about the series with the Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    As with the previous series, we are working in collaboration with In the Telling, our partners providing the platform and video production. Their Telling Story platform allows people to choose their level of engagement, from just watching the video to accessing synchronized transcripts and accessing transmedia. We have added content directly to the timeline of each video, bringing up further references, like e-Literate blog posts or relevant scholarly articles, in context. With In The Telling’s help, we are crafting episodes that we hope will be appealing and informative to those faculty, presidents, provosts, and other important college and university stakeholders who are not ed tech junkies.

    We will release three more case studies over the next month or two, and we also have two episodes discussing the common themes we observed on the campuses. We welcome your feedback, either in comments or on Twitter using the hashtag #eLiterateTV.

    Enjoy!

  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2

    In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:

    1. Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
    2. Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
    3. Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
    4. Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.

    I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. One implication of this is that there is no platform that will magically make education dramatically better if it works against the grain of the teaching practices in which it is embedded. The two need to co-evolve.

    This last bit is an exceedingly tough nut to crack. If we were to design a great platform for conversation-based courses but it got adopted for typical lecture/test courses, the odds are that faculty would judge the platform to be “bad.” And indeed it would be, for them, because it wouldn’t have been designed to meet their particular teaching needs. At the same time, one of our goals is to use the platform to propagate exemplary pedagogical practices. We have a chicken and egg problem. On top of that, our goals suggest assessment solutions that differ radically from traditional ones, but we only have a vague idea so far of what they will be or how they will work. We don’t know what it will take to get them to the point where faculty and students generally agree that they are “fair,” and that they measure something meaningful. This is not a problem we can afford to take lightly. And finally, while one of our goals is to get teachers to share exemplary designs and practices, we will have to overcome significant cultural inhibitions to make this happen. Sometimes systems do improve sharing behavior simply by making sharing trivially easy—we see that with social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, for example—but it is not at all clear that just making it easy to share will improve the kind of sharing we want to encourage among faculty. We need to experiment in order to find out what it takes to help faculty become comfortable or even enthusiastic about sharing their course designs. Any one of these challenges could kill the platform if we fail to take them seriously.

    When faced with a hard problem, it’s a good idea to find a simpler one you can solve that will get you partway to your goal. That’s what the use case I’m about to describe is designed to do. The first iteration of any truly new system should be designed as an experiment that can test hypotheses and assumptions. And the first rule of experimental design is to control the variables.

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  • e-Literate TV Preview: Essex County College and changing role of faculty

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Michael and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    In this video preview (about 4:18 in duration), we hear from two faculty members who have first-hand experience in using a personalized learning approach as well as a traditional approach to remedial math. We also hear from students on what they are learning about learning. In our case studies so far, the real faculty issue is not that software is being designed to replace faculty, but rather that successful implementation of personalized learning necessarily changes the role of faculty. One of our goals with e-Literate TV is to allow faculty, staff and students to describe direct experiences in their own words. Take a look.

    Stay tuned for the full episodes to be released on the In The Telling platform ((ITT is our partner in developing this series, providing video production as well as the platform.)). You can follow me (@PhilOnEdTech), Michael (@mfeldstein67), or e-Literate TV (@eLiterateTV) to stay up to date. You can also follow the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. We will also announce the release here on e-Literate.

  • ITC #eLearning2015 Keynote Video and Material

    This past week I had the opportunity to provide the keynote at the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) eLearning2015 conference in Las Vegas. ITC is a great group that provides leadership and professional development to faculty and staff in community and junior colleges in online education, and increasingly in hybrid course models. To save time on individual sharing, I have included most of the material below.

    Here is the MediaSite recording of the keynote:

    And here are the slides in SlideShare: (more…)