e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: personalized learning

  • Release of e-Literate TV Series on Personalized Learning

    Today we are thrilled to release the initial episodes in our new e-Literate TV series on “personalized learning”. In this series, we examine how that term, which is heavily marketed but poorly defined, is implemented on the ground at a variety of colleges and universities. What does it really mean in practice? What problem is intended to solve? And how well is it working?

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    We have initially released case studies of approximately 30 minutes each from two very different schools – Middlebury College and Essex County College. You can see all the episodes (either 2 or 3 per case study) at the series link, and you can access individual episodes below.

    e-Literate TV, owned and run by MindWires Consulting, is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. When we first talked about the series with the Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    As with the previous series, we are working in collaboration with In the Telling, our partners providing the platform and video production. Their Telling Story platform allows people to choose their level of engagement, from just watching the video to accessing synchronized transcripts and accessing transmedia. We have added content directly to the timeline of each video, bringing up further references, like e-Literate blog posts or relevant scholarly articles, in context. With In The Telling’s help, we are crafting episodes that we hope will be appealing and informative to those faculty, presidents, provosts, and other important college and university stakeholders who are not ed tech junkies.

    We will release three more case studies over the next month or two, and we also have two episodes discussing the common themes we observed on the campuses. We welcome your feedback, either in comments or on Twitter using the hashtag #eLiterateTV.

    Enjoy!

  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2

    In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:

    1. Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
    2. Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
    3. Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
    4. Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.

    I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. One implication of this is that there is no platform that will magically make education dramatically better if it works against the grain of the teaching practices in which it is embedded. The two need to co-evolve.

    This last bit is an exceedingly tough nut to crack. If we were to design a great platform for conversation-based courses but it got adopted for typical lecture/test courses, the odds are that faculty would judge the platform to be “bad.” And indeed it would be, for them, because it wouldn’t have been designed to meet their particular teaching needs. At the same time, one of our goals is to use the platform to propagate exemplary pedagogical practices. We have a chicken and egg problem. On top of that, our goals suggest assessment solutions that differ radically from traditional ones, but we only have a vague idea so far of what they will be or how they will work. We don’t know what it will take to get them to the point where faculty and students generally agree that they are “fair,” and that they measure something meaningful. This is not a problem we can afford to take lightly. And finally, while one of our goals is to get teachers to share exemplary designs and practices, we will have to overcome significant cultural inhibitions to make this happen. Sometimes systems do improve sharing behavior simply by making sharing trivially easy—we see that with social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, for example—but it is not at all clear that just making it easy to share will improve the kind of sharing we want to encourage among faculty. We need to experiment in order to find out what it takes to help faculty become comfortable or even enthusiastic about sharing their course designs. Any one of these challenges could kill the platform if we fail to take them seriously.

    When faced with a hard problem, it’s a good idea to find a simpler one you can solve that will get you partway to your goal. That’s what the use case I’m about to describe is designed to do. The first iteration of any truly new system should be designed as an experiment that can test hypotheses and assumptions. And the first rule of experimental design is to control the variables.

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  • e-Literate TV Preview: Essex County College and changing role of faculty

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Michael and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    In this video preview (about 4:18 in duration), we hear from two faculty members who have first-hand experience in using a personalized learning approach as well as a traditional approach to remedial math. We also hear from students on what they are learning about learning. In our case studies so far, the real faculty issue is not that software is being designed to replace faculty, but rather that successful implementation of personalized learning necessarily changes the role of faculty. One of our goals with e-Literate TV is to allow faculty, staff and students to describe direct experiences in their own words. Take a look.

    Stay tuned for the full episodes to be released on the In The Telling platform ((ITT is our partner in developing this series, providing video production as well as the platform.)). You can follow me (@PhilOnEdTech), Michael (@mfeldstein67), or e-Literate TV (@eLiterateTV) to stay up to date. You can also follow the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. We will also announce the release here on e-Literate.

  • e-Literate TV Case Study Preview: Middlebury College

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Phil and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. Both our preview posts and the series itself start with Middlebury College. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. And as part of our effort to establish a more objective frame, we started the series by going not to a school that was a Gates Foundation grantee but to the kind of place that Americans probably think of first when they think of a high-quality personalized education outside the context of technology marketing. We decided to go to an elite New England liberal arts college. We wanted to use that ideal as the context for talking about personalizing learning through technology. At the same time, we were curious to find out how technology is changing these schools and their notion of what a personal education is.

    We picked Middlebury because it fit the profile and because we had a good connection through our colleagues at IN THE TELLING. ((Full disclosure: Since filming the case study, Middlebury has become a client of MindWires Consulting, the company that Phil and I run together.)) We really weren’t sure what we would find once we arrived on campus with the cameras. Some of what we found there was not surprising. In a school with a student/teacher ratio of 8.6 to 1, we found strong student/teacher relationships and empowered, creative students. Understandably, we heard concerns that introducing technology into this environment would depersonalize education. But we also heard great dialogues between students and teachers about what “personalized” really means to students who have grown up with the internet. And, somewhat unexpectedly, we saw some signs that the future of educational technology at places like Middlebury College may not be as different from what we’re seeing at public colleges and universities as you might think, as you’ll see in the interview excerpt below.

    Jeff Howarth is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Middlebury. He teaches a very popular survey-level course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). But it’s really primarily a course about thinking about spaces. As Jeff pointed out to me, we typically provide little to no formal education on spacial reasoning in primary and secondary schooling. So the students walking into his class have a wide range of skills, based primarily on their natural ability to pick them up on their own. This broad heterogeneity is not so different from the wide spread of skills that we saw in the developmental math program at Essex County College in Newark, NJ. Furthermore, the difference between a novice and an expert within a knowledge domain is not just about how many competencies they have racked up. It’s also about how they acquire those competencies. Jeff did his own study of how students learn in his class which confirmed broader educational research showing that novices in a domain tend to start with specific problems and generalize outward, while experts (like professors, but also like more advanced students) tend to start with general principles and apply them to the specific problem at hand. As Jeff pointed out to me, the very structure of the class schedule conspires against serving novice learners in the way that works best for them. Typically, students go to a lecture in which they are given general principles and then are sent to a lab to apply those principles. That order works for students who have enough domain experience to frame specific situations in terms of the general principles but not for the novices who are just beginning to learn what those general principles might even look like.

    When Jeff thought about how to serve the needs of his students, the solution he came up with—partly still a proposal at this point—bears a striking resemblance to the basic design of commercial “personalized learning” courseware. I emphasize that he arrived at this conclusion through his own thought process rather than by imitating commercial offerings. Here’s an excerpt in which he describes deciding to flip his classroom before he had ever even heard of the term:

    In the full ten-minute episode, we hear Jeff talk about his ideas for personalized courseware (although he never uses that term). And in the thirty-minute series, we have a great dialogue between students and faculty as well as some important context setting from the college leadership. The end result is that the Middlebury case study shows us that personalized learning software tools do not just have to be inferior substitutes for the real thing that are only for “other people’s children” while simultaneously reminding us of what a real personal education looks like and what we must be careful not to lose as we bring more technology into the classroom.

  • A New e-Literate TV Series is in Production

    We have been quiet about e-Literate TV lately, but it doesn’t mean that we have been idle. In fact, we’ve been hard at work filming our next series. In addition to working with our old friends at IN THE TELLING—naturally—we’re also collaborating with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and getting funding and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    As we have discussed both here and elsewhere, we think the term “personalized learning” carries a lot of baggage with it that needs to be unpacked, as does the related concept of “adaptive learning.” The field in general is grappling with these broad concepts and approaches; an exploration of specific examples and implementations should sharpen our collective understandings about the promise and risks of these concepts and approaches. The Gates foundation has funded the development of an ETV series and given us a free editorial hand to explore the topics of personalization and adaptive learning.

    The heart of the series will be a series of case studies at a wide range of different schools. Some of these schools will be Gates Foundation grantees, piloting and studying the use of “personalized learning” technology or product, while others will not. (For more info about some of the pilots that Gates is funding in adaptive learning, including which schools are participating and the evaluation process the foundation has set up to ensure an object review of the results, see Phil’s post about the ALMAP program.) Each ETV case study will start by looking at who the students are at a particular school, what they’re trying to accomplish for themselves, and what they need. In other words who are the “persons” for whom we are trying to “personalize” learning? Hearing from the students directly through video interviews will be a central part of this series. We then take a look at how each school is using technology to support the needs of those particular students. We’re not trying to take a pro- or anti- position on any of these approaches. Rather, we’re trying to understand what personalization means to the people in these different contexts and how they are using tools to help them grapple with it.

    Because many Americans have an idealized notion of what a personalized education means that may or may not resemble what “personalized learning” technologies deliver, we wanted to start the series by looking at that ideal. We filmed our first case study at Middlebury College, an elite New England liberal arts college that has an 8-to-1 student/teacher ratio. They do not use the term “personalized learning” at Middlebury, and some stakeholders there expressed the concern that technology, if introduced carelessly, could depersonalize education for Middlebury students. That said, we heard both students and teachers talk about ways in which even an eight-person seminar can support more powerful and personalized learning through the use of technology.

    The second school on our list was Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, where we are filming as of this writing (but will be finished by publication time). As you might imagine, the students, their needs, and their goals and aspirations are different, and the school’s approach to supporting them is different. Here again, we’ll be asking students and teachers for their stories and their views rather than imposing ours. We intend to visit a diverse handful of schools, with the goal of releasing a few finished case studies by the end of this year and more early next year.

    With the help of the good folks at ELI, we will also be bringing together a panel at the ELI 2015 conference, consisting of the people from the various case studies to have a conversation about what we can learn about the idea of personalized learning by looking across these various contexts and experiences. This will be a “flipped” panel in the sense that the panelists (and the audience) will have had the opportunity to watch the case study videos before sitting down and talking to each other. The discussion will be filmed and included in the ETV series.

    We’re pretty excited about the series and grateful, as always, to the support of our various partners. We’ll have more to say—and show—soon.

    Stay tuned.

  • Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program (ALMAP) Summer Meeting Notes

    I recently attended the ALMAP Summer Meeting. ALMAP is a program funded by the Gates Foundation, with the goals described in this RFP webinar presentation from March 2013:

    We believe that well implemented personalized & adaptive learning has the potential to dramatically improve student outcomes

    Our strategy to accelerate the adoption of Adaptive Learning in higher education is to invest in market change drivers… …resulting in strong, healthy market growth

    As the program is in its mid stage (without real results to speak of yet), I’ll summarize Tony Bates style with summary of program and some notes at the end. Consider this my more-than-140-character response to Glenda Morgan:

    Originally planned for 10 institutions, the Gates Foundation funded 14 separate grantees at a level of ~$100,000 each. The courses must run for 3 sequential semesters with greater than 500 students total (per school), and the program will take 24 months total (starting June 2013). The awards were given to the following schools:

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  • “Personalized Learning” Is Redundant

    Dan Meyer has just published a provocative post called “Don’t Personalize Learning,” inspired by an even more provocative post with the same title by Benjamin Riley (as well as being a follow-up to Meyer’s post “Tools for Socialized Instruction not Individualized Instruction“). Part of the confound here is sloppy terminology. Specifically, I think the term “personalized learning” doesn’t really mean anything, so it’s hard to have an intelligent conversation about it.

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