Back around New Year, Michael wrote a post examining Pearson’s efficacy initiative and calling on the company to engage in active discussions with various communities within higher education about defining “efficacy” with educators rather than for educators. It turns out that post got a fair bit of attention within the company. It was circulated in […]
Pearson-PLC
Blackboard’s Perceptis Acquisition Offers Clues into Company’s Strategy
Yesterday Blackboard announced that they acquired Perceptis, a provider of help desk and financial aid support services for colleges and universities. In and of itself, this is not a huge acquisition. Perceptis has 33 clients, offers services that Blackboard was already offering, and has no substantial new technology. But as we approach BbWorld next week, […]
Efficacy, Adaptive Learning, and the Flipped Classroom, Part II
In my last post, I described positive but mixed results of an effort by MSU’s psychology department to flip and blend their classroom: On the 30-item comprehensive exam, students in the redesigned sections performed significantly better (84% improvement) compared to the traditional comparison group (54% improvement). Students in the redesigned course demonstrated significantly more improvement […]
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 […]
New e-Literate TV Episode: Adaptive Learning and Learning Analytics
In our latest episode, the penultimate in the pilot series, we explore the topics that are likely to be moving up the curve of the hype cycle this year—adaptive learning and learning analytics. Like many of the topics in the pilot series, we could have made an entire series about this one. (And maybe we […]
An Employee View of Textbook Publishers and Ed Tech Companies
Update: For reference, 2U has pointed out to me that they were recently recognized by Glassdoor as the 17th-best medium-sized company to work for in 2014. With an average score of 4.2 (based on 21 reviews), this puts them on top of the other ed tech companies discussed here. The only other education company on the Glassdoor […]
Lessons from the Boundless Copyright Infringement Suit
On December 17th, the Boundless OER-based textbook startup issued a press release describing the settlement they had reached with Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan in the lawsuit those three companies had filed against the company. (Full disclosure: Pearson has been a client of MindWires Consulting.) Actually, a lot of the press release wasn’t really about the […]