Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to dispute that Pearson has an outsized impact on education in America. This huge company—they have a stock market valuation of $18 billion—touches all levels from kindergarten through career education, providing textbooks, homework platforms, high-stakes testing, and even helping to design entire online degree programs. So when they […]
MIke Caulfield
Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina
While it is well hidden, wrapped in a very careful press release, Phil’s sharp eye has caught the details in SJSU’s press release about the next phase in the Udacity pilot that suggest the partnership between the school and the company is winding down. When Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed asked an SJSU spokesperson point-blank […]
Massive, Open, and Course Design
Martin Weller has a great blog post up about course design responses to MOOC completion rates. He starts by arguing that, while completion rates are not everything in MOOCs, they are not nothing either. A lot depends on whether you think completion is an important metric to meet the course goals because, for example, the […]
Course Signals Effectiveness Data Appears to be Meaningless (and Why You Should Care)
My father likes to say, “If you stick your head in the freezer and your feet in the oven, on average you’ll be comfortable.” Behind this pithy saying is an insight that is a little different from the “three kinds of lies” saying about statistics. It suggests that certain types of analysis produce a false […]
Please Welcome Featured Blogger Mike Caulfield
Michael and I have been very impressed with the articles from Mike Caulfield, an edublogger who writes at Hapgood. Mike is director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, and he and Michael first met at a Lumen Learning event this summer. In addition to writing at his blog, Mike Caulfield has also written an […]
Digging into the Purdue Course Signals Results
Update: Mike has written another post clarifying the intuitions behind his math. The spectacular Mike Caulfield casts a skeptical eye on the Course Signals data: Only a portion of Purdue’s classes are Course Signals classes, so the chance any course a freshman takes is a Course Signals course can be expressed as a percentage, say 25%. […]