Two weeks ago I attended the WCET Conference in Denver. While much smaller than EDUCAUSE and some others, I find these conferences to be great learning experiences, especially as WCET supports open dialogue between academic leaders (provosts, deans, etc), academic IT and edtech support, and industry leaders. The combination of mindsets – especially the combination […]
Online Education
Competency-Based Education: An (Updated) Primer for Today’s Online Market
There has been a significant amount of progress and interest in competency-based education, as Wisconsin has launched its Flexible Option program, federal legislators are pushing the concept, ‘patient zero’ has graduated from College for America, and resistance is emerging to the concept. I thought it might be useful to update and re-share the primer that […]
e-Literate TV trailer from EDUCAUSE 2013
Last week Michael announced a new project of ours called e-Literate TV. To recap, the idea is that there are new groups involved in decisions that impact ed tech and online education. Deans, provosts, presidents, boards of trustees, state legislators, and even national media are newly interested in topics with different levels of understanding and different […]
Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week
In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses […]
You know what would help MOOC articles? Getting the facts and goals right before analyzing
Keith Devlin has an article at Huffington Post today titled “MOOC Mania Meets the Sober Reality of Education”. The premise is that the halting of the San Jose State University (SJSU) / Udacity pilot project and of SB 520 show that naive assumptions on the power of MOOCs to disrupt higher education are insufficient in […]
New Post at WCET: Update on California Online Initiatives
I have a new post up at WCET with updates on the California Online Initiatives driven by state government, including today’s news that SB520 is on hold. The big news today is that the controversial bill seeking to allow for-credit partially-outsourced online education in California has been put on hold until at least 2014. [snip] […]
Desire2Learn’s Analytics Product Looks Very Good
I’ve been super-busy with a consulting gig over the last few weeks and have fallen off the wagon with my blogging. This is one of the many reasons that I am grateful to have Phil as my prolific yet profound co-publisher and that we have attracted a group of terrific featured bloggers. Anyway, I thought […]