e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Middlebury College

  • e-Literate TV Preview: Essex County College and changing role of faculty

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Michael and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    In this video preview (about 4:18 in duration), we hear from two faculty members who have first-hand experience in using a personalized learning approach as well as a traditional approach to remedial math. We also hear from students on what they are learning about learning. In our case studies so far, the real faculty issue is not that software is being designed to replace faculty, but rather that successful implementation of personalized learning necessarily changes the role of faculty. One of our goals with e-Literate TV is to allow faculty, staff and students to describe direct experiences in their own words. Take a look.

    Stay tuned for the full episodes to be released on the In The Telling platform ((ITT is our partner in developing this series, providing video production as well as the platform.)). You can follow me (@PhilOnEdTech), Michael (@mfeldstein67), or e-Literate TV (@eLiterateTV) to stay up to date. You can also follow the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. We will also announce the release here on e-Literate.

  • e-Literate TV Case Study Preview: Middlebury College

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Phil and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. Both our preview posts and the series itself start with Middlebury College. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. And as part of our effort to establish a more objective frame, we started the series by going not to a school that was a Gates Foundation grantee but to the kind of place that Americans probably think of first when they think of a high-quality personalized education outside the context of technology marketing. We decided to go to an elite New England liberal arts college. We wanted to use that ideal as the context for talking about personalizing learning through technology. At the same time, we were curious to find out how technology is changing these schools and their notion of what a personal education is.

    We picked Middlebury because it fit the profile and because we had a good connection through our colleagues at IN THE TELLING. ((Full disclosure: Since filming the case study, Middlebury has become a client of MindWires Consulting, the company that Phil and I run together.)) We really weren’t sure what we would find once we arrived on campus with the cameras. Some of what we found there was not surprising. In a school with a student/teacher ratio of 8.6 to 1, we found strong student/teacher relationships and empowered, creative students. Understandably, we heard concerns that introducing technology into this environment would depersonalize education. But we also heard great dialogues between students and teachers about what “personalized” really means to students who have grown up with the internet. And, somewhat unexpectedly, we saw some signs that the future of educational technology at places like Middlebury College may not be as different from what we’re seeing at public colleges and universities as you might think, as you’ll see in the interview excerpt below.

    Jeff Howarth is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Middlebury. He teaches a very popular survey-level course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). But it’s really primarily a course about thinking about spaces. As Jeff pointed out to me, we typically provide little to no formal education on spacial reasoning in primary and secondary schooling. So the students walking into his class have a wide range of skills, based primarily on their natural ability to pick them up on their own. This broad heterogeneity is not so different from the wide spread of skills that we saw in the developmental math program at Essex County College in Newark, NJ. Furthermore, the difference between a novice and an expert within a knowledge domain is not just about how many competencies they have racked up. It’s also about how they acquire those competencies. Jeff did his own study of how students learn in his class which confirmed broader educational research showing that novices in a domain tend to start with specific problems and generalize outward, while experts (like professors, but also like more advanced students) tend to start with general principles and apply them to the specific problem at hand. As Jeff pointed out to me, the very structure of the class schedule conspires against serving novice learners in the way that works best for them. Typically, students go to a lecture in which they are given general principles and then are sent to a lab to apply those principles. That order works for students who have enough domain experience to frame specific situations in terms of the general principles but not for the novices who are just beginning to learn what those general principles might even look like.

    When Jeff thought about how to serve the needs of his students, the solution he came up with—partly still a proposal at this point—bears a striking resemblance to the basic design of commercial “personalized learning” courseware. I emphasize that he arrived at this conclusion through his own thought process rather than by imitating commercial offerings. Here’s an excerpt in which he describes deciding to flip his classroom before he had ever even heard of the term:

    In the full ten-minute episode, we hear Jeff talk about his ideas for personalized courseware (although he never uses that term). And in the thirty-minute series, we have a great dialogue between students and faculty as well as some important context setting from the college leadership. The end result is that the Middlebury case study shows us that personalized learning software tools do not just have to be inferior substitutes for the real thing that are only for “other people’s children” while simultaneously reminding us of what a real personal education looks like and what we must be careful not to lose as we bring more technology into the classroom.

  • A New e-Literate TV Series is in Production

    We have been quiet about e-Literate TV lately, but it doesn’t mean that we have been idle. In fact, we’ve been hard at work filming our next series. In addition to working with our old friends at IN THE TELLING—naturally—we’re also collaborating with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and getting funding and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    As we have discussed both here and elsewhere, we think the term “personalized learning” carries a lot of baggage with it that needs to be unpacked, as does the related concept of “adaptive learning.” The field in general is grappling with these broad concepts and approaches; an exploration of specific examples and implementations should sharpen our collective understandings about the promise and risks of these concepts and approaches. The Gates foundation has funded the development of an ETV series and given us a free editorial hand to explore the topics of personalization and adaptive learning.

    The heart of the series will be a series of case studies at a wide range of different schools. Some of these schools will be Gates Foundation grantees, piloting and studying the use of “personalized learning” technology or product, while others will not. (For more info about some of the pilots that Gates is funding in adaptive learning, including which schools are participating and the evaluation process the foundation has set up to ensure an object review of the results, see Phil’s post about the ALMAP program.) Each ETV case study will start by looking at who the students are at a particular school, what they’re trying to accomplish for themselves, and what they need. In other words who are the “persons” for whom we are trying to “personalize” learning? Hearing from the students directly through video interviews will be a central part of this series. We then take a look at how each school is using technology to support the needs of those particular students. We’re not trying to take a pro- or anti- position on any of these approaches. Rather, we’re trying to understand what personalization means to the people in these different contexts and how they are using tools to help them grapple with it.

    Because many Americans have an idealized notion of what a personalized education means that may or may not resemble what “personalized learning” technologies deliver, we wanted to start the series by looking at that ideal. We filmed our first case study at Middlebury College, an elite New England liberal arts college that has an 8-to-1 student/teacher ratio. They do not use the term “personalized learning” at Middlebury, and some stakeholders there expressed the concern that technology, if introduced carelessly, could depersonalize education for Middlebury students. That said, we heard both students and teachers talk about ways in which even an eight-person seminar can support more powerful and personalized learning through the use of technology.

    The second school on our list was Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, where we are filming as of this writing (but will be finished by publication time). As you might imagine, the students, their needs, and their goals and aspirations are different, and the school’s approach to supporting them is different. Here again, we’ll be asking students and teachers for their stories and their views rather than imposing ours. We intend to visit a diverse handful of schools, with the goal of releasing a few finished case studies by the end of this year and more early next year.

    With the help of the good folks at ELI, we will also be bringing together a panel at the ELI 2015 conference, consisting of the people from the various case studies to have a conversation about what we can learn about the idea of personalized learning by looking across these various contexts and experiences. This will be a “flipped” panel in the sense that the panelists (and the audience) will have had the opportunity to watch the case study videos before sitting down and talking to each other. The discussion will be filmed and included in the ETV series.

    We’re pretty excited about the series and grateful, as always, to the support of our various partners. We’ll have more to say—and show—soon.

    Stay tuned.