To recap what’s happened so far: Audrey Watters called our attention to a patent filing by Khan Academy. I expressed my concerns about the continuing patent problem that we have in educational technology. Carl Straumsheim explained the defensive use of patents in more detail and in the process motivated me to take a look at […]
Khan Academy
Ed Tech Patent Update: The Innovator’s Agreement
Carl Straumsheim has a good piece out on the Khan Academy patent Inside Higher Ed today. Much of it is a primer on the uses and limitations of defensive patents, but there is a piece on the specific nature of the patent pledge that Khan Academy has signed that I missed. The pledge, originally created […]
Solving the Ed Tech Patent Problem
You may have heard that Khan Academy has filed for several patents. Audrey Watters has written a really strong piece providing the details of the filings in the context of the history of ed tech patents and showing why some academics feel that the patent system clashes with the values upon which academia was built. In the process, she excavates some of my personal history in the Blackboard patent war.
ASU Is No Longer Using Khan Academy In Developmental Math Program
In these two episodes of e-Literate TV, we shared how Arizona State University (ASU) started using Khan Academy as the software platform for a redesigned developmental math course ((The terms remedial math and developmental math are interchangeable in this context.)) (MAT 110). The program was designed in Summer 2014 and ran through Fall 2014 and Spring […]
OER and the Future of Knewton
Jose Ferriera, the CEO of Knewton, recently published a piece on edSurge arguing that scaling OER cannot “break the textbook industry” because, according to him, it has low production values, no instructional design, and is not enterprise grade. Unsurprisingly, David Wiley disagrees. I also disagree, but for somewhat different reasons than David’s.
Hello? Pedagogy?
With all the hype about massive and adaptive and big data, it’s hard to remember sometimes that real flesh and blood humans do know some things about teaching and learning. In fact, we know a lot about it in some areas. We’re just not very good at disseminating and deploying it effectively across our educational […]
Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)
No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple […]