e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: SUNY

  • I’m Giving a Live-streamed Talk on Thursday at SUNY

    I’ll be giving a talk at the OpenSUNY conference tomorrow (Thursday) at 4:00 PM. The title of the talk is “Everything Old is New Again: What You Taught the OPM Companies.” But it’s about a lot more than that. SUNY was my first gig in higher education, after doing stints in K12 and corporate e-Learning, so it’s going to be a bit of a homecoming for me. I’ll be sharing some lessons learned over the intervening 14 years—for me and for them.

    The streaming URL is at http://opensunysummit2019.edublogs.org/mediasite/. I believe the video will also be available afterward for those who can’t catch the talk live.

  • Release of University of California at Davis Case Study on e-Literate TV

    Today we are thrilled to release the fifth and final case study 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. We plan to cap off this series with two analysis episodes looking at themes across the case studies.

    We are adding three episodes from the University of California at Davis (UC Davis), a large research university that has a strong emphasis in science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM fields. The school has determined that the biggest opportunity to improve STEM education is to improve the success rates in introductory sciences classes – the ones typically taught in large lecture format at universities of their size. Can you personalize this most impersonal of academic experiences? What opportunities and barriers do institutions face when they try to extend personalized learning approaches?

    You can see all the case studies (either 2 or 3 per case study) at the series link, and you can access individual episodes below. (more…)

  • Release of Empire State College Case Study on e-Literate TV

    Today we are thrilled to release the fourth case study 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.

    We are adding two episodes from Empire State College (ESC), a school that was founded in 1971 as part of the State University of New York. Through a lot of one-on-one, student-faculty interactions, the school was designed to serve the needs of students who don’t do well at traditional colleges. What problems are they trying to solve? How do students view some of the changes? What role does the practice of granting prior-learning assessments (PLA) play in non-traditional students’ education?

    You can see all the case studies (either 2 or 3 per case study) at the series link, and you can access individual episodes below. (more…)

  • The IMS’s New “Caliper” Learning Analytics Interoperability Framework Is Deeply Interesting

    The IMS has announced the initial public release of something they call Caliper, which they characterize as a learning analytics interoperability framework. But it’s actually much, much more than that. In fact, it represents the functional core of something that my SUNY colleagues and I used to refer to as a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS), and is something that I have been hoping to see for eight years, because it promises to resolve the tension between the flexibility of lots of  separately developed, specialized learning tools and the value and convenience of an integrated system.

    Let’s take a peek at the framework to see why I’m so hopeful about this framework. But before we do that, you should fasten your seat belts and strap on your aviator goggles. It’s going to get geeky in here.

    (more…)

  • Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making

    Update 4/25 and bumped due to changes: Thanks to Greg Ketcham and Robert Knipe, I have replaced the 2009 interim proposal document with the updated advisory team report. This changes the intro blurb, description of 9 inter-dependent components, and list of contributions below.

    I have been surprised at how little interest the Open SUNY announcement last week generated in educational media and blog discussions. Perhaps the MOOC portion of the story, which was prominent in several headlines, caused people to assume this was just another school trying to jump on the bandwagon. What is significant, however, is that one of the largest statewide systems in the country is making a multi-pronged approach to reduce time-to-graduation and therefore lower student costs.

    In brief, Open SUNY is part of the system’s agenda to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level, and it has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts. The concept for the strategic plan originated in 2009, eventually leading to the report Getting Down to Business: Interim Report of the Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team released in December 2012 [updated].

    The Advisory Team recommends “Open SUNY” be officially adopted as the name of SUNY’s new online learning initiative. The term Open SUNY represents an opening up of the educational opportunities that SUNY can provide through the enhancement of existing—and development of new—online education resources, courses and degree programs.

    Open SUNY has the clear potential to establish SUNY as the preeminent and most extensive online learning environment in the nation by providing affordable, high quality, convenient, innovative, and flexible online education opportunities for the citizens of the State of New York and beyond. As a collaborative online educational network, the Open SUNY Online Consortium (SUNY campuses and SUNY system offices) will draw on the Power of SUNY to connect students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world, and link them to the best in research-based online teaching and learning environments, practices, and resources. Dedicated to providing access to open and online learning opportunities, Open SUNY will connect learner and community needs and will allow the State University of New York to bring this concept to scale like no other college, university, or system in the United States.

    (more…)

  • SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments

    Last week Steve Kolowich wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the State University of New York (SUNY) system approval of a plan that would target reduced time-to-degree.

    The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money.

    The plan calls for “new and expanded online programs” that “include options for time-shortened degree completion.” In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY’s Empire State College.

    Although the MOOC angle led the article’s title and online discussion, there was more significant news in terms of structural change regarding Prior Learning Assessments (PLA).

    Even before the SUNY announcement, it had already been a big week for nontraditional models for awarding college credit. The U.S. Education Department on Monday said it had no problem with spending federal student aid on college programs that give credit based on “competency,” not the number of hours students spend in class.

    Empire State College’s prior-learning assessment programs operate on a similar principle. Students who can demonstrate that they have acquired certain skills can get college credit, even if they did not acquire those skills in a college classroom.

    The new SUNY effort will aim to copy the Empire State model across the system, said Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor.

    “This resolution opens the door to assurances to our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.

    (more…)

  • Why All LMS’s Are ‘Pretty Good/Bad’

    I got a lot of positive feedback on my “Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process” post, so I’m going to continue the occasional series. You can find all the posts in the series at any time by going to the “small school LMS selection” tag on my site.

    To recap, these posts may apply to your school if at least three of the following are true:

    • You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
    • You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
    • You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
    • Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
    • Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
    • Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
    • You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
    • You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.

    In my first post, I wrote both that “all of these systems are pretty good” and that “all of these systems are pretty bad”. While that’s rhetorically cute (maybe), I realize that it’s not terribly helpful without some more explanation. So this post will provide that explanation.