e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: MOOC

  • Opening Up the LMS Walled Garden

    In yesterday’s post I described where I (and many others) see the LMS market heading in terms of interoperability.

    At the same time, the LMS does a very poor job at providing a lot of the learning technologies desired by faculty and students. There is no way that a monolithic LMS can keep up with the market – it cannot match functionality of open internet tools especially without adding feature bloat.

    I would add that part of the cause of the “false binary position” that D’Arcy points out is that much of the public commentary focuses on where the LMS has been rather than where it is going. There is a significant movement based on interoperability that is leading, perhaps painfully and slowly, to a world where the LMS can coexist with open educational tools, with even end users (faculty and students) eventually having the ability to select their tools that can share rosters and data with the institutional LMS.

    Coexistence and interoperability, however, should not imply merely having links from the LMS to external tools as is too often the case.

    The Walled Garden

    The LMS (which George Station rightly points out was really called the Course Management System in the early years) started out as a walled garden with basic functionality of syllabus sharing, announcements, gradebook, email, and a few other tools.

    walledgarden

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  • LMS and Open: The false binary is based on past, not future markets

    D’Arcy Norman has an excellent blog post up titled “On the false binary of LMS vs. Open” that captures a false framing issue.

    We’re pushed into a false binary position – either you’re on the side of the evil LMS, working to destroy all that is beautiful and good, or you’re on the side of openness, love, and awesomeness. Choose. There is no possible way to teach (or learn) effectively in an LMS! It is EVIL and must be rooted out before it sinks its rotting tendrils into the unsuspecting students who are completely and utterly defenseless against its unnatural power!

    While D’Arcy is a proponent of open tools, he rightly calls out the need to understand institutional responsibilities.

    But. We can’t just abdicate the responsibility of the institution to provide the facilities that are needed to support the activities of the instructors and students. That doesn’t mean just “hey – there’s the internet. go to it.” It means providing ways for students to register in courses. For their enrolment to be automatically processed to provision access to resources (physical classrooms, online environments, libraries, etc…). For students’ grades and records to be automatically pushed back into the Registrar’s database so they can get credit for completing the course. For integration with library systems, to grant acccess to online reserve reading materials and other resources needed as part of the course.

    This is an important point, in that the institutional LMS is important and will not, and should not, go away anytime soon. I have pointed out recently that the LMS is one of the very few technologies now used in a majority of courses within an institution, and the institutional responsibility described above helping to explain why. (more…)

  • Coursera shifts focus from ‘impact on learners’ to ‘reach of universities’

    Richard Levin, the new CEO of Coursera, is getting quite clear about the new goals for the company. At first glance the changes might seem semantic in nature, but I believe the semantics are revealing. Consider this interview with the Washington Post that was published today in the Washington Post [emphasis added in both cases below]:

    Richard C. Levin, the new chief executive of Coursera, the most widely used MOOC platform, wants to steer the conversation back to what grabbed public attention in the first place: the wow factor.

    Sure, Levin said, the emerging technology will help professors stimulate students on campus who are tired of old-school lectures. The talk of “flipped classrooms” and “blended learning” — weaving MOOCs into classroom experiences — is not mere hype.

    “But that is not the big picture,” Levin said in a visit last week to The Washington Post. “The big picture is this magnifies the reach of universities by two or three orders of magnitude.”

    Contrast this interview with Daphne Koller’s December article at EdSurge:

    Among our priorities in the coming year, we hope to shift the conversation around these two dimensions of the learning experience, redefine what it means to be successful, and lay the groundwork for products, offerings, and features that can help students navigate this new medium of learning to meet their own goals, whether that means completing dozens of courses or simply checking out a new subject. [snip]

    Still, we are deeply committed to expanding our impact on populations that have been traditionally underserved by higher education, and are actively working to broaden access for students in less-developed countries through a range of initiatives

    There are valid criticisms of how well Coursera has delivered on its goal of helping students meet their own learning goals, but now it is apparent that the focus of their efforts is shifting away from the learner and towards the institution. Below are a few notes based on these recent interviews.

    Changing Direction From Founders’ Vision

    This is the second interview where Levin contradicts the two Coursera founders. In the case above Levin shows the point of Coursera is not primarily impact on learners but is reach of great universities. In a New York Times interview from April he made similar points in contrast to Andrew Ng. (more…)

  • A response to new NCES report on distance education

    By Phil Hill and Russ Poulin, cross-posted to WCET blog

    Last week the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a new report analyzing the new IPEDS data on distance education. The report, titled Enrollment in Distance Education Courses, by State: Fall 2012, is a welcome addition to those interested in analyzing and understanding the state of distance education (mostly as an online format) in US higher education.

    The 2012 Fall Enrollment component of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) survey collected data for the first time on enrollment in courses in which instructional content was delivered exclusively through distance education, defined in IPEDS as “education that uses one or more technologies to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction be- tween the students and the instructor synchronously or asynchronously.” These Web Tables provide a current profile of enrollment in distance education courses across states and in various types of institutions. They are intended to serve as a useful baseline for tracking future trends, particularly as certain states and institutions focus on MOOCs and other distance education initiatives from a policy perspective.

    We have previously done our own analysis of the new IPEDS data at both e-Literate and WCET blogs. While the new report is commendable in its improved access to the important dataset, we feel the missing analysis and potentially misleading introductory narrative takes away from the value of this report.

    Value of Report

    The real value of this report in our opinion is the breakdown of IPEDS data by different variables such as state jurisdiction, control of institution, sector and student level. Most people are not going to go to the trouble of generating custom tables, so including such data in a simple PDF report will go a long way towards improving access to this important data. As an example of the data provided, consider this excerpt of table 3:

    NCES Table 3 excerpt

    The value of the data tables and the improved access to this information are precisely why we are concerned about the introductory text of the report. These reports matter.
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  • Learner-Centered Analytics: Example from UW La Crosse MOOC research

    Last week I wrote a post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics. As a recap, my argument was:

    Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX data provides no insight into learner patterns of behavior over time. Did the discussion forum posts increase or decrease over time, did video access change over time, etc? We don’t know. There is some insight we could obtain by looking at the last transaction event and number of chapters accessed, but the insight would be limited. But learner patterns of behavior can provide real insights, and it is here where the University of Phoenix (UoP) could teach Harvard and MIT some lessons on analytics.

    Beyond the University of Phoenix, there other examples of learner-centered analytics exploring usage patterns over time. While I was at a summit at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse last week, Bob Hoar showed me some early results of their “UW-System College Readiness Math MOOC” research that is part of the MOOC Research Initiative. I interviewed Bob Hoar and Natalie Solverson as part of e-Literate TV, where they described their research project:

    The results to date focus on capturing and visualizing the student patterns, and progress can be tracked at this project site (go to the site to see interactive graphics). (more…)

  • Why Unizin is a Threat to edX

    In the week since we published our Unizin exposé, there has been nary a peep from the group to us, or apparently to the traditional news outlets either. When we ran the piece, we emailed Indiana University CIO Brad Wheeler to request comment or corrections. We have not heard back from him yet. Brad, if you’re reading this, our door is always open. Talk to us.

    Luckily for us, we don’t need to rely on new pronouncements from Brad to give us more insight into what’s going on. It turns out that he’s been speaking in public about this idea for years. He just hasn’t called it Unizin. And from what I can tell, it should give edX cause to worry.

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  • Partial Transcript: Richard Levin (new Coursera CEO) on Charlie Rose

    I have written two posts recently about Coursera’s appointment of the former president of Yale as the company’s new CEO, with the implicit argument that this move represents a watershed moment for commercial MOOCs. In particular, Coursera seems likely to become the third generation of Richard Levin’s dream, following AllLearn and Open Yale Courses. I’ve also argued that Levin is embellishing the history by making Internet bandwidth a primary factor in the demise of AllLearn when the lack of a viable business model was the more important issue, with even Levin arguing this point.

    Richard Levin was just interviewed by Charlie Rose, and I am including a transcript of most of the segment (starting around 3:15), highlighting some key points in bold. This interview should give us further insight into the future of commercial MOOCs, especially as we have the first non-founder CEO in one of the big three commercial MOOC providers. Follow this link to watch on CharlieRose.com and avoid the annoying Hulu ad.

    Rose: You could have gotten a government job, as an ambassador or something; maybe been Secretary of the Treasury as far as I know . . . you could have done a lot of things. But you’re out running some online education company (laughs).

    Levin: It’s a fantastic mission, it’s really the perfect job for me and for following a university president’s [job].

    Rose: Why’s that?

    Levin: One, I like running things, so it’s an opportunity to run something. But most important it’s so much an extension of what I’ve tried to do. It’s to take Yale to the world, and this is an opportunity to take 108 of the world’s greatest educational institutions (and there’ll probably be some more) and teach the planet.

    (more…)