e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Khan Academy

  • Patents Rethought: Khan Academy Did the Right Thing

    To recap what’s happened so far:

    Since then, I had a little more time to look at the actual legal language of the agreement and reflect on the larger edupatent problem. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Khan Academy did the right thing by adopting the agreement. We should feel good about what they’ve done. And given the realities that software patents exist and defensive patents are therefore a necessary evil, we should encourage other educational patent holders to do as Khan has done and adopt the same agreement.

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  • 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 by Twitter, is quite similar to my own proposal in a number of ways. It turns the decision-making regarding offensive use of the patent over to another party and, importantly, the agreement travels with the patent, even if it changes hands:

    The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

    Shame on me for not doing my homework.

    The big difference between this pledge and the one I propose is that I am suggesting that the third party be a trust rather than the inventing engineer. This has several virtues. First, engineers die, and not all of them are going to be equally vigilant in protecting education. Can the engineer sell this right to somebody else? Can the right be inherited? If it isn’t inherited, is the patent then unencumbered? Giving the rights to a trust lays this concern to rest. It also creates a proactive deterrent because the trust could sue anybody that is asserting an ed tech patent.

    What I take from the details of Twitter’s pledge is that my proposal is probably legally viable. The original pledge just needs to be adapted to serve the specific needs of education.

  • 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. While I am sympathetic to arguments against ed tech or software patents on principle, my own personal reasons for getting involved with that fight were more utilitarian. I believed then, as I do now, that patents threaten to kill innovation in educational technology due to the specific characteristics of the market. The outcome of Blackboard v. Desire2Learn did not end that threat, although it did temporarily reduce it. The conversation being provoked by Khan Academy’s filings offers a new opportunity to come up with a more permanent solution. (more…)

  • 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 2015 terms. Recognizing the public information shared through e-Literate TV, ASU officials recently informed us that they had made a programmatic change and will replace their use of Khan Academy software with McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart software that is used in other sections of developmental math.

    To put this news in context, here is the first episode’s mention of Khan Academy usage. (more…)

  • 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.

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  • 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 systems. Massive and adaptive and big data could help solve those problems to the degree that the people behind them would pay close attention to what humans already know. But more often than not, they are not paying attention. Or they have picked up on some little sliver, such as the role of repetition in long-term memory formation, and built a whole product around it. In general, educational experts are brought in as occasional consultants and best, and ignored altogether at worst.

    That is why I find this critique of Sal Khan’s videos by Christopher Danielson, a math and math education teacher at a community college, so refreshing and important. This is not snarky, “Mystery  Teacher Theatre 2000” stuff. Nor is it a hysterical rant on why computers could NEVER replace teachers. Rather, it is a careful, research-backed analysis of what’s wrong with one aspect of Sal Khan’s math videos, with the explicit goal of helping Khan to improve the value of his work. This is incredibly good stuff. And as a bonus, Danielson demonstrates just how easy it is to use a social network like Twitter to get help from a community of educators.

    We really need to figure out how to get better at inviting this kind of dialogue. We shouldn’t just rely on the Christopher Danielsons of the world to beat on the doors of the great tech temples until somebody can be bothered to answer.

  • 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 motivations and maybe because the desire for scale is not something that is polite to talk about due to a certain amount of discomfort with it. But the motivation is definitely there if you look closely, as I’ll get into in a bit.

    The problem is that both of these approaches, in their current incarnations, miss one absolutely critical element of the teaching process. As you can probably guess from all the qualifiers I am using in my language, I don’t think it’s an inherent or permanent failing. But I worry that it’s a failing due to a deep cultural blind spot that we have about what education is, and that it therefore will be challenging to address.

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