In this live case study in ed tech and student privacy that is unfolding before us, Piazza makes some changes in response to recent criticism of their practices.
Stanford
University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes
After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar […]
LMS Market Updates, Dec 2015
There seems to be a series of news and analysis on the LMS higher education market worth summarizing. Major Adoption News I posted last weekend about University of Phoenix (UoP) and their LMS. UoP is well-known for being the biggest user of a homegrown LMS for well over a decade, but in the past several years […]
Student Course Evaluations and Impact on Active Learning
The Chronicle has an article out today, “Can the Student Course Evaluation Be Redeemed?”, that rightly points out how student course evaluations are often counter-productive to improving teaching and learning. The article refers to a Stanford professor’s call for an instructor completed “inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use”, but most of the article centers […]
The Battle for Open and MOOC Completion Rates
Yesterday I wrote a post on the 20 Million Minds blog about Martin Weller’s new book The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Exploring different aspects of open in higher education – open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship – Weller shows how far the concept of openness […]
Combining MOOC Student Patterns Graphic with Stanford Analysis
In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared a description of five student patterns emerging from open-enrollment MOOCs (excluding those with an associated student fee) based on anecdotal data. In part 4 I compared the overall course completion pattern against an MIT study of the first edX […]
MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?
Robert McGuire wrote an article for Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, that touches on an important topic – is the centralized discussion forum a barrier to student engagement? But more students can also mean more isolation within the crowd. “Online classes can be really lonely places for students if they don’t feel […]