After last year’s disastrous outage at UC Davis due to Scriba Corp’s change of data center for the Sakai LMS (branded as SmartSite at UC Davis), it turns out that there is more damage to be done as the company slowly disappears. What appears to have happened in the past few months is that Scriba has […]
UC Davis
Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues
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.
UT Austin and SMOCs: What do we know about whether they work?
In episode 1, we looked at an effort by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin to develop SMOCs – Synchronous Massive Online Courses – where the core of the redesign centers on the synchronous online experience for large lecture courses (1000+ students in some cases) courses.1 In episode 2, we took a […]
UT Austin and SMOCs: What these synchronous courses look like and cost
Last month we shared a video describing how the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin is taking a different approach than some of the courseware-based or other course redesign efforts.1 In many of these other redesigns, there is an emphasis on the asynchronous elements of lab section and lecture preparation and even fully […]
UT Austin and SMOCs: One university’s effort to personalize large lecture courses
Last summer we shared video interviews from the University of California at Davis describing their efforts to personalize the most impersonal of learning experiences – the large lecture introductory course.1 The organizing idea there is to apply active learning principles such as the flipped classroom, leveraging adaptive courseware from the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) out of Carnegie […]
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 […]
Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy
Based on Thursday’s blog post “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, Piazza’s CEO Pooja Sankar invited me to meet at their offices Friday afternoon. Given the nature of Thursday’s post, I offered to publish any statement that Piazza had in response here at e-Literate, an offer they accepted. I will defer further […]