e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: ELI

  • We’re Giving a Course on Personalized Learning Next Month

    Working with our good friends at ELI, we’re going to be offering a three-session synchronous course called Personalized Learning: Finding the Model That Fits Your Institution July 6th through 20th. As you know, we’re still in early days for personalized learning. Most campus communities are still trying to figure out what it is and what it’s good for—if they’re aware of it at all as a group. Plus, one size most emphatically does not fit all. The goal of the course is to help participants sharpen their own ideas for appropriate ways to facilitate exploration of the topic at their own institutions.

    The format will be highly participatory, especially in the second and third sessions. Phil and I expect that we will all learn a lot from each other.

    Join us!

  • 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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  • Wanted – A Theory of Change

    Phil and I went to the ELI conference this week. It was my first time attending, which is odd given that it is one of the best conferences that I’ve attended in quite a while. How did I not know this?

    We went, in part, to do a session on our upcoming e-Literate TV series, which was filmed for use in the series. (Very meta.) Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz did a fantastic job of both facilitating and participating in the conversation. I can’t wait to see what we have on film. Phil and I also found that an usually high percentage of sessions were ones that we actually wanted to go to and, once there, didn’t feel the urge to leave. But the most important aspect of any conference is who shows up, and ELI did not disappoint there either. The crowd was diverse, but with a high percentage of super-interesting people. On the one hand, I felt like this was the first time that there were significant numbers of people talking about learning analytics who actually made sense. John Whitmer from Blackboard (but formerly from CSU), Mike Sharkey from Blue Canary (but formerly from University of Phoenix), Rob Robinson from Civitas (but formerly from the University of Texas), Eric Frank of Acrobatiq (formerly of Flat World Knowledge)—these people (among others) were all speaking a common language, and it turns out that language was English. I feel like that conversation is finally beginning to come down to earth. At the same time, I got to meet Gardner Campbell for the first time and ran into Jim Groom. One of the reasons that I admire both of these guys is that they challenge me. They unsettle me. They get under my skin, in a good way (although it doesn’t always feel that way in the moment).

    And so it is that I find myself reflecting disproportionately on the brief conversations that I had with both of them, and about the nature of change in education.

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  • A Sneak Preview of e-Literate TV at ELI

    Phil and I will be chatting with Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz about our upcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning in a featured session at ELI tomorrow. We’ll be previewing short segments of video case studies that we’ve done on an elite New England liberal arts college, an urban community college, and large public university. Audience participation in the discussion is definitely encouraged. It will be tomorrow at 11:45 AM in California C for those of you who are here at the conference, and also webcast for those of you registered for the virtual conference.

    We hope to see you there.

  • Upcoming EDUCAUSE Webinars on Dec 4th and Dec 8th

    Michael and I will be participating in two upcoming EDUCAUSE webinars.

    Massive and Open: A Flipped Webinar about What We Are Learning

    On Thursday, December 4th from 1:00–2:00 p.m. ET we will be joined by George Siemens for an EDUCAUSE Live! webinar:

    In 2012, MOOCs burst into public consciousness with course rosters large enough to fill a stadium and grand promises that they would disrupt higher education. Two years later, after some disappointments, setbacks, and not a small amount of schadenfreude, MOOCs seem almost passé. And yet, away from the sound and the fury, researchers and teachers have been busy finding answers to some basic questions: What are MOOCs good for, and what can we learn from them? Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein will talk about what we’re learning so far. (more…)

  • ELI Podcast: Emerging Issues Around MOOCs

    Michael and I were interviewed by Veronica Diaz for the EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) podcast series. The theme was looking not at where MOOCs are today, but at where MOOCs might go in the future. The interview is about 13 minutes in length and covers questions such as:

    • Coursera just raised $43m of funding – what potential do investors see in MOOCs?
    • Based on recent Forbes article – do you see MOOCs as replacing parts of traditional higher ed?
    • Will growing numbers of online students reduce hesitation of employers to hire online students? How does this affect institutions being proxies for quality?
    • What applications are there for MOOCs beyond academic programs? (with interesting answer from Michael based on DS106)

    You can access the podcast on iTunes under the EDUCAUSE channel (just search ‘educause’ and go to episode 18), through the EDUCAUSE site, or by the link below.

  • Insight on MOOC student types from ELI Focus Session

    Michael and I had the privilege of leading off the ELI Online Spring Focus Session on MOOCs (taking place today, Apr 3, and tomorrow). Thanks to Stephen Downes, we have a good set of notes on our presentation “Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong” (program & resources, notes) as well as the other sessions already on each of the sessions on his blog. You know, I think he actually believes this stuff about learner-generated content and self-forming communities . . .  In all seriousness, this is a great session by ELI, great notes by Stephen, and it’s instructive to see the various channels such as chat, Twitter, Google+, and blogs tied to the session (most using #elifocus).

    There was an interesting presentation from Seth Anderson (Duke), Amy Collier (Stanford), Cassandra Horlii (California Institute of Technology) titled “Designing and Implementing MOOCs that Maximize Student Learning” (program & resources, notes) that gives additional insight into MOOC student types. Quoting from Stephen’s notes:

    In most of the MOOCs Stanford has offered, fewer than half the students have come from North America. Nearly half the people in a MOOC may not have a knowledge of English as a first language. They have a more varied educational and cultural background than in traditional courses.

    The majority of active users say they’re taking the course for fun or a challenge, rather than a credential. The tendency to judge MOOCs based on completion rates overlooks the reasons why people join a MOOC. The majority engage in sampling behaviour – like the people in this webinar. Many are MOOC auditors, but they don’t engage, and they aren’t motivated by completion records.

    This is an important aspect of MOOCs and open courses in general that gets missed by popular media and even by some MOOC faculty. The students have varying goals and behavior within a course, and it is a mistake to assume they should converge on a common goal and set of behaviors.

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