e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: results

  • On ECAR data and ed tech purgatory

    Recently I wrote a post about many ed tech products being stuck in pilots without large-scale adoption.

    In our consulting work Michael and I often help survey institutions to discover what technologies are being used within courses, and typically the only technologies that are used by a majority of faculty members or in a majority of courses are the following:

    • AV presentation in the classroom;
    • PowerPoint usage in the classroom (obviously connected with the projectors);
    • Learning Management Systems (LMS);
    • Digital content at lower level than a full textbook (through open Internet, library, publishers, other faculty, or OER); and
    • File sharing applications. [snip]

    This stuck process ends up as an ed tech purgatory – with promises and potential of the heaven of full institutional adoption with meaningful results to follow, but also with the peril of either never getting out of purgatory or outright rejection over time.

    With the Chronicle’s Almanac coming out this week, there is an interesting chart that on the surface might contradict the above information, showing ~20 technologies with above 50% adoption.

    Note: Data are drawn from responses by a subset of more than 500 of the nearly 800 institutions that participated in a survey conducted from June to October 2013. Reported statistics are either an estimated proportion of the population or an estimated median. Source: Educause Center for Analysis and Research
    Note: Data are drawn from responses by a subset of more than 500 of the nearly 800 institutions that participated in a survey conducted from June to October 2013. Reported statistics are either an estimated proportion of the population or an estimated median.
    Source: Educause Center for Analysis and Research [ECAR]
    The difference, however, is that ECAR (through The Chronicle) asked how many institutions have different ed tech products and our survey asked how many courses within an institution use different ed tech products.

    There are plenty of technologies being piloted but few hitting the mainstream, and adoption within an institution is one of the key indicators to watch.

  • Pilots: Too many ed tech innovations stuck in purgatory

    Steve Kolowich wrote an article yesterday in the Chronicle that described the use of LectureTools, a student engagement and assessment application created by faculty member Perry Sampson at the University Michigan. These two paragraphs jumped out at me.

    The professor has had some success getting his colleagues to try using LectureTools in large introductory courses. In the spring, the software was being used in about 40 classrooms at Michigan, he says.

    Adoption elsewhere has been scattered. In 2012, Mr. Samson sold LectureTools to Echo360 ((Disclosure: Echo360 was a recent client of MindWires)), an education-technology company, which has started marketing it to professors at other universities. The program is being used in at least one classroom at 1,100 institutions, according to Mr. Samson, who has kept his title of chief executive of LectureTools. But only 80 are using the software in 10 or more courses.

    93% of LectureTools clients use the tool for less than 10 courses total, meaning that the vast majority of customers are running pilot projects almost two years after the company was acquired by a larger ed tech vendor.

    We are not running out of ideas in the ed tech market – there are plenty of new products being introduced each year. What we are not seeing, however, are ed tech innovations that go beyond a few pilots in each school. Inside Higher Ed captured this sentiment when quoting a Gallup representative after the GSV+ASU EdInnovations conference this year: (more…)