The other day, I wrote a post about community-negotiated focus and how we want e-Literate TV to be a kind of “choose your own adventure in ed tech” experience, both for individuals and for campus communities. You can get a sense of how we’re trying to do that in the first series with Phil’s interview of Inside Higher Education Editors Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik. They talk about the changing landscape of education, why different topics in educational technology come up in the first place, and how the ways in which those topics are raised can have either a positive or a negative impact. This is the anchor episode for the series and is intended to provoke discussion that would lead to the group finding a focus in their collaborative ed tech investigation that’s important to them.
Tag: Inside Higher Ed
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Gen Ed and Competency-Based Education
Inside Higher Ed has a write-up today on an effort by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to develop a competency-based framework for general education called General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), funded by a multi-million-dollar Gates Foundation grant. I am honored to report that I have been invited to participate on one of the GEMs committees.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about competency-based education (CBE). On the one hand, I do think that an earnest attempt to have a norming conversation and set some standards for what we hope students will learn at college is very important and badly overdue. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to apply CBE in a mechanistic and reductive way that ignores the important but hard-to-measure skills precisely because they’re hard to measure. It’s essentially the same worry that a number of readers expressed in the comments on my post about Pearson’s efficacy initiative. That said, AAC&U has a good shot at assembling the right stakeholders to grapple with this complexity appropriately. I do think there are models out there. For example, ASU’s Habitable Worlds class, which is both competency-based and mastery-based, is not at all dumbed down and could even be further expanded to include writing and similar open-ended analytic and communications skills. (I interviewed Habitable Worlds co-creator Ariel Anbar last year.) But there are many challenges.
Anyway, the first meeting of the GEMs group is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know what I think after spending a couple of days talking about the issues with the working group.
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Purdue University Has an Ethics Problem
It’s fair to say that Purdue University has sparked several important conversations in ed tech through their work on Course Signals. First, they pretty much put the retention early warning system as a product category on the map, conducting ground-breaking research and building a system that several major ed tech players have either licensed or imitated. More recently, they have sparked a conversation about the state of ed tech research and peer review as their more recent research has been called into question. I highly recommend reading the comment threads on these two posts to get a sense of that conversation.
Now I think Purdue may spark a third conversation—this time around the ethics of institutional learning analytics research and commercialization. Because there is no question in my mind that they have a serious ethical problem on their hands.