e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: personalized learning

  • Teaching Using Adaptive Learning

    The entire six-part interview series with McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive learning experts is now up on YouTube. (Full disclosure: In the months between the filming and the publication of these videos, McGraw-Hill became a client of MindWires.) Here’s a good segment on teaching:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSqoc6Y_4No)

    The first example Matt Haldeman gives is a math class, which is where we see adaptive learning used the most. The interesting part of it is how he describes the change in the teacher’s classroom activities. This is a critical aspect this often isn’t picked up when these products are used in higher ed math classes—particularly outside of developmental math.

    The second example is a history class, which is a less (stereo)typical example. The focus is on class preparation. In other words, the adaptive platform helps students come to class knowing what you hope they’ll know but often haven’t really absorbed from a reading assignment that is meant to give them the raw materials they need for an interesting class discussion on a topic.

    Here’s the whole series, if you want to all six segments in order:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o&list=PLb2UcU-aVjN2aPSmGKILK2GHh6MgGswM9)

  • McGraw-Hill Education’s Perspective on Adaptive Learning

    Last spring, I had the opportunity to interview some of the top folks on McGraw-Hill Education’s (MHE’s) digital team to get their view on adaptive learning. Between ALEKS, LearnSmart, and SmartBooks, they have the developed the most well articulated adaptive strategy of any of the big publishers, under the leadership of Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster. And on a personal note, Al Essa, their Vice President of Research and Data Science, has been a friend since the days when he was CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and he and both were working on an open source LMS project. (Al also helped with analysis of the Blackboard patent back when he was at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and ran a simulation giving some matheatical rigour to Mike Caulfield’s intuition that some of Purdue University’s Course Signals research was off.) So I was interested to hear what MHE’s digital team had to say about the role of adaptive learning in the classroom, what learning science does and doesn’t tell us, and other related topics.

    For reasons that aren’t worth going into, this video sat in the can waiting to go into post-production for about six months. Here, finally, is the first segment in what will be a series produced from the interview:

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o)

    More of the interview will be coming soon.

    Full disclosure: In the intervening months between when this video was shot and now, MHE became a client of MindWires.

  • Explainer Video on Flipped Class, Learning Analytics, and Adaptive Learning

    We now have the second of our personalized learning explainer videos out. As a reminder, here’s the first one, which reframes personalized learning as a set of approaches for addressing the teaching problems of reaching hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/8wDw33NLuT0)

    The new one starts to talk about the how, giving flipped class, learning analytics, and adaptive learning as examples of tools or approaches that can help teachers reach those hard-to-reach students:

    (https://youtu.be/USAHX56lWqE)

    Some folks continue to be confused about just how these things are supposed to help. We described some of our thinking in our original post on the first explainer and our recent piece in Inside Higher Ed. We are well aware of a number of hard limits on what we can accomplish, including but not limited to the following:

    • A couple of 3-minute videos are not going to change the world all by themselves.
    • The levers and barriers for change are different at different institutions.
    • Vendors are going to be out selling, the press is going to be out hyping, and institutional stakeholders are going to be looking for silver bullets no matter what.

    But we also find ourselves in the fortunate position of having some credibility with academic administrators, ed tech advocates, and vendors. If we can help our readers to nudge the inevitable and already ongoing conversations about courseware products in a more healthy direction, away from robot tutors in the sky and toward enabling teaching practices that reach more students, that would be a good thing. We’re creating these explainers as tools that can be used by any of the parties to those conversations to reframe the discussion. If we’re lucky, we’ll influence the ways in which the vendors pitch these products in the first place while also preparing educators to take advantage of the different pitch to ask more educationally relevant questions and nudge the procurement process in a healthier direction. We won’t always be so lucky. But we won’t always be unlucky either. A lot comes down to each of you and what you can accomplish in your respective contexts. We’re just trying to give you a few more tools to work with. You’re the change agents.

  • OSU Panel Discussion: Faculty experience with adaptive learning for Intro to Psychology course

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article and highlighted comments on vendors over-promising here at e-Literate. This time I’d like to highlight part of a panel discussion where a faculty member relates her experiences – what worked and what didn’t work – when using adaptive learning tools.

    Kathryn Becker-Blease has taught Intro to Psychology, a large lower-division lecture course, using both traditional quizzing and with adaptive quizzing with the help of Macmillan’s LearningCurve. In this part of the panel discussion Susana Rivera-Mills, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, asks Becker-Blease about her experiences based on research and teaching.

    (more…)

  • Marketing Claims From Adaptive Learning Vendors As Barrier To Adoption

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.))  I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article.

    At one point I asked what people saw as risks or barriers to further adoption of adaptive learning courseware, and two people had very similar responses. In a nutshell, the over-active marketing claims from many vendors could be the biggest barrier. This is somewhat counter-intuitive as over-active marketing is commonly seen as the cause of technology being adopted even when it should not be. Listen to their responses (< 30 seconds).

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  • Personalized Learning Explainer: Teaching to the Back Row

    Phil and I are pleased to share our first animated explainer on personalized learning:

    If it feels like a commercial that could have been produced by a textbook publisher or ed tech vendor, that is entirely intentional. We hope that they will actively promote this video (and the successor that we will be publishing in the next couple of weeks). We are giving them tools they will (hopefully) want to use that move the focus away from product bells and whistles and toward teaching challenges. This attempt at jujitsu is worth some unpacking.

    (more…)

  • Personalized Learning at Law Schools

    I recently had the honor of speaking at the CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) conference. I was invited by one of my early heroes, John Mayer. When I first arrived on the ed tech blogging scene, John was already here, doing stuff. He inspired me.

    Anyway, you may or may not know that law schools are currently experiencing an enrollment crisis. As a result, they are accepting students who are below their normal standards. These students are, unsurprisingly, not doing as well (on average) as their predecessors. So I ask the question: Is the problem that the students are “worse,” or is it that nobody is actually teaching law school students, and that the ones being admitted could succeed if only somebody taught them?

    Here’s the video of the keynote, if you’re interested: