e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Florida

  • New post at 20MM: Two Approaches to Watch in Remedial Education Innovation

    The 20 Million Minds Foundation is starting a new blog, and for topics of mutual interest, Michael and I will be posting articles  several times a month on their site and occasionally cross-posting here. The first article of mine went up last week.

    Two Approaches to Watch in Remedial Education Innovation

    It is no secret that the current approach to remedial (or developmental) courses does not work. According to a study by Complete College America (see original for footnotes documenting sources):

    “The numbers tell a dispiriting story. Half of all undergraduates and 70 percent of community college students take at least one remedial course. Too many of these students never overcome being placed into a remedial course. Only about a quarter of community college students who take a remedial course graduate within eight years. In fact, most students who are referred to remedial education do not even complete the remedial sequence: One study found 46 percent of students completed the sequence in reading and only 33 percent completed it in math.”

    Following the maxim that “if it doesn’t work, try something else”, two community colleges on opposite coasts – Miami-Dade College in Florida and Cerritos College in California – are trying to change the game. What can we learn from these two divergent examples?

    Read the whole article here.

     

  • Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education

    At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.

    Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”

    “Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

    His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.

    “The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

    I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.

    https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064

    (more…)