A while back, I mentioned that MindWires, the consulting company that Phil and I run, had been hired by Pearson in response to a post I wrote a while back expressing concerns about the possibility of the company trying to define “efficacy” in education for educators (or to them) rather than with them. The heart of the engagement was us facilitating conversations with different groups of educators about how they think about learning outcomes—how they define them, how they know whether students are achieving them, how the institution does or doesn’t support achieving them, and so on. As a rule, we don’t blog about our consulting work here on e-Literate. But since we think these conversations have broader implications for education, we asked for and received permission to blog about what we learn under the following conditions:
- The blogging is not part of the paid engagement. We are not obliged to blog about anything in particular or, for that matter, to blog at all.
- Pearson has no editorial input or prior review of anything we write.
- If we write about specific schools or academics who participated in the discussions, we will seek their permission before blogging about them.
I honestly wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come out of these conversations that would be worth blogging about. But we got some interesting feedback. It seems to me that the aspect I’d like to cover in this post has implications not only for Pearson, and not only for ed tech vendors in general, but for open education and maybe for the future of education in general. It certainly is relevant to my recent post about why the LMS is the way it is and the follow-up post about fostering better campus conversations. It’s about the role of research in educational product design. It’s also about the relationship of faculty to the scholarship of teaching.