e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sebastian Thrun

  • Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

    While it is well hidden, wrapped in a very careful press release, Phil’s sharp eye has caught the details in SJSU’s press release about the next phase in the Udacity pilot that suggest the partnership between the school and the company is winding down. When Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed asked an SJSU spokesperson point-blank whether Udacity would continue to be involved with the courses, the reply he got was “Good question for Udacity.”

    Ouch.

    The Schadenfreude surrounding Sebastian Thrun’s fall from grace has been intense ever since the Fast Company article quoted the man who the author labeled the “godfather of free online education” as saying that he realized he had a bad product, and noted that his company is “changing course” to focus on corporate training. Mike Caulfield captured the tone of the reaction in ed tech circles rather nicely when he wrote:

    Thrun can’t build a bucket that doesn’t leak, so he’s going to sell sieves….Udacity dithered for a bit on whether it would be accountable for student outcomes. Failures at San José State put an end to that. The move now is to return to the original idea: high failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs, because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers. Thrun is moving to an area where he is unaccountable, because accountability is hard.

    I imagine that it would be easy for somebody running or funding an ed tech startup to draw the wrong lessons from this sad story. Consider this blog post to be an open letter to my friends at ed tech startups with some advice about how to avoid the kind of disdain and ridicule that Thrun is receiving now.

    (more…)

  • SJSU and Udacity End Game: 3 courses to be offered for-credit on Canvas LMS

    After a great deal of publicity from their spring and summer pilots, San Jose State University has just announced that they will offer three of the courses again in Spring 2014 – but with a twist. On the surface, the announcement sounds like a continuation of the pilot.

    This spring, San Jose State will offer three online courses that were developed with Udacity to SJSU and California State University students.

    San Jose State students are registering now for Elementary Statistics, Introduction to Programming and General Psychology. In addition, the programming and statistics courses will be open to all CSU students through the CSU’s CourseMatch program.

    But after digging deeper, it really appears that this is an effort to separate without admitting failure or making either side look bad. There are some significant changes here:

    • Udacity is no longer being paid for the courses;
    • All the course content is free and open to SJSU and CSU faculty;
    • The for-credit course content will be on Udacity platform but faculty interactions and assessments will be run on SJSU’s official LMS (Canvas); and
    • SJSU will provide the teaching assistants.

    (more…)

  • Changing the Narrative

    As Phil mentioned, he and I were both lucky to attend the MOOC Research Initiative conference, which was a real tour de force. Jim Groom observed that even the famously curmudgeonly Stephen Downes appeared to be enjoying himself, and I would make a similar observation about the famously curmudgeonly Jonathan Rees. If both of those guys can be simultaneously (relatively) pleased at a MOOC conference, then something is going either spectacularly right or horribly wrong. I believe it was the former in this case.

    We are at one of those rare moments when there’s enough confusion that real conversation happens and possibilities open up. The sense I got is that everybody is really grappling with the questions of where we can take the concept of a “MOOC” and what MOOCishness might be good for. That is fun and hope-inducing. Phil and I spent a lot of the time interviewing folks for a future e-Literate TV series (coming to a computing device near you in March or April of 2014), so we were lucky to hear a lot of perspectives. There is some very good exploration happening now. George Siemens and his fellow conference organizers (as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which sponsored the event and the research) did a real service by bringing people together to talk about these issues at this pregnant moment.

    One thing happened toward the end of the conference that has me puzzled, though. Jim mentioned it in his blog post:

    At the same time[,] Bon Stewart’s admonitions for some kind of organized response to start filling the temporary void of direction with alternative narrative still rings in my ears—and it is very much the lesson I took away from Audrey Watters keynote at OpenEd.

    There was a lot of conversation, really throughout the conference but coming to a head at the end, that the term of MOOC is somehow damaged goods and that…something…should be done about it. Usually the word “narrative” was brought up. But this talk of “alternative narratives” or, as Bonnie put it, “changing the narrative”, confuses me. As far as I’m concerned, the connectivist/open ed crowd has been spectacularly, stunningly successful at “changing the narrative,” and I’m not at all clear what it would look like to somehow do it differently. I don’t understand what they mean here. Unfortunately I had to rush out the door to try to catch a plane shortly after the panel discussion and didn’t have an opportunity to follow up with some of the attendees. So I’m going to try to express my confusion in this blog post and hope that somebody can help me figure out what I’m missing.

    Warning: This post is long and lit crit wonkish.

    (more…)

  • MOOC Mania: Stanford AI Course Creates Media Sensation Two Years Ago

    It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president’s cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic.

    Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011. I have not included ed tech blogs in this list, but it is worth noting that George Siemens wrote about the new MOOC on August 4 – exactly two years ago.

    And the rest, for better or worse, is history. Let me know if I’ve missed any key articles in this time frame, and I’ll update.

  • California SB 520 Currently Misses the Mark, but Not By Much

    Phil has done a great job of covering the news of California’s new bill (or stub of a bill, really) that would create a state-wide system of third-party online courses that would be available to students who would otherwise be shut out of courses that they need to graduate. It’s a good problem to tackle, since it would both make life better for students and improve the long-term state budget situation. Unfortunately, I don’t think the current incarnation of the bill takes into account either the full context and needs of students who find themselves shut out of the core courses or the directions that MOOCs are evolving into. As a result, it offers a bad prescription for the solution. The good news is that the shortcomings can be fixed while remaining well within the spirit of the bill.

    (more…)

  • OpenClass vs the MOOC

    When Pearson’s OpenClass was announced about a year and a half ago, the natural question to ask was whether it would disrupt the LMS market. But that was then and this is now. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) The more interesting question today is where OpenClass stands vis-à-vis the MOOCs. To begin with, it certainly appears that the LMS and MOOC markets may be on a collision course. But beyond that, Pearson is a content provider first and foremost. With both the content and the platform at their disposal, as well as an array of assessment tools, they certainly have all the raw materials to build MOOCs. Is that where OpenClass is going? I recently had a short conversation with Pearson’s SVP of Product, Adrian Sannier, to find out. And the answer appears to be, “Not exactly.”

    (more…)

  • Re:Booting CA Higher Education: My First Thoughts

    As expected, the 20 Million Minds-sponsored event was fascinating and information-packed. Kudos to the foundation for setting up such a rich and, I think, important meeting. In fact, I’m still digesting it, and may need to write several posts to lay out my thoughts once the dust settles. But I do want to get my initial thoughts down while they are fresh. In particular, underneath all the head nodding and apparent agreement, there were some strikingly divergent ideas about the future of higher education that are worth spelling out in some detail.

    (more…)