Mike Caulfield wrote a post yesterday about a new Blackboard report on design findings regarding online students. The focus of Mike’s post was that people often assume that the norm for an “online” student is taking all courses online, when in fact it is more common for students to take some courses online and some […]
MIke Caulfield
What Homework and Adaptive Platforms Are (and Aren’t) Good For
I was delighted that we are able to publish Mike Caulfield’s post on how ed tech gets personalization backwards, partly because Mike is such a unique and inventive thinker, but also because he provided such a great example of how “personalized learning” teaching techniques are different than adaptive content and other product capabilities. The heart of his post […]
We Have Personalization Backwards
[Note – an earlier version of the first half of this post was first published at Mike’s Hapgood site. We asked him to make some alterations for the e-Literate audience and republish here. – ed] Indie Rock and Donald Trump I drive my oldest daughter to high school every day. She goes to a magnet […]
Data To Back Up Concerns Of Textbook Expenditures By First-Generation Students
David Wiley has added to the conversation over use of data on college textbook pricing and student spending patterns with “The Practical Cost of Textbooks”. The key argument is to go beyond prices and spending and look at the most direct measure of asking students themselves how textbooks costs have impacted them.
Asking What Students Spend On Textbooks Is Very Important, But Insufficient
It is important to look at both types of data – textbook list prices and student expenditures – to see some of the important market dynamics at play. All in all, students are exercising their market power to keep their expenditures down – buying used, renting, borrowing, obtaining illegally, delaying purchase, or just not using at all.
NPR and Missed (Course) Signals
Anya Kamenetz has a piece up on NPR about learning analytics, highlighting Purdue’s Course Signals as its centerpiece. She does a good job of introducing the topic to a general audience and raising some relevant ethical questions. But she missed one of the biggest ethical questions surrounding Purdue’s product—namely, that some of its research claims […]
Efficacy Math is Hard
David Wiley has a great post up on efficacy and OER in response to my original post about Pearson’s efficacy plan. He opens the piece by writing about Benjamin Bloom’s famous “2 sigma” problem: The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to drastically increasing learning. The two-part problem is that we don’t know how […]