If online courses or programs breaks down the barriers of campus walls and enables anytime, anywhere education, then why not explore how collaboration can open up access and improve quality. While we tend to not write e-Literate about our consulting work through MindWires, in this case we have heard a general interest from other systems to learn more about what the California Online Education Initiative (OEI) at the community college system is doing.
personalized learning
Chan/Zuckerberg: The “Tech” is not the Hard Part in “Ed Tech”
Phil and I were recently interviewed by KQED’s Sarah Tan for a story about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Summit platform. As often happens when our comments are just one bit of a larger story—particularly when we are asked to provide a more critical external perspective as a check on the enthusiastic reports of a project’s participants—some interesting parts of the interview conversation inevitably ended up on the cutting room floor. Ms. Tan was kind enough to grant us permission to repurpose some of the source material from the interview for this blog post.
Explainer Videos on Course Exchanges and the Shared Infrastructure Behind Them
Two months ago O’Neal Spicer and I wrote an op-ed for the Community College Daily describing our observations on the California Online Education Initiative (OEI). We don’t often write about clients of ours, but in this case we felt it would be useful to share our thoughts outside of the consulting context, and the OEI staff […]
UT Austin and SMOCs: What do we know about whether they work?
In episode 1, we looked at an effort by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin to develop SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous online experience for large lecture courses (1000+ students in some cases) courses.1 In episode 2, we took a […]
UT Austin and SMOCs: What these synchronous courses look like and cost
Last month we shared a video describing how the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin is taking a different approach than some of the courseware-based or other course redesign efforts.1 In many of these other redesigns, there is an emphasis on the asynchronous elements of lab section and lecture preparation and even fully […]
Vendor Roles in Fostering Educational Literacies
In my last post, I talked about the need for educators in general and faculty in particular to develop literacy around data and analytics. But it’s really broader than that. Back when college was intended for a relatively small percentage of the population, the idea of “weeding out” students who couldn’t make it without help was not obviously out of alignment with its mission.
UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses
Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course.1 The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie […]