e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: universities

  • ED and CBE: Example of higher ed “structural barrier to change” that is out of institutions’ control

    There has been a great conversation going on in the comments to my recent post “Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes” on too many relevant issues to summarize (really, go read the ongoing comment thread). They mostly center on the institution and faculty reward system, yet those are not the only sources of structural barriers to change that lead institutions to this “difficulty adopting their own changes”. Increasingly there are outside forces that both encourage change and resist change, and it is important to recognize the impact of the entire higher education ecosystem.

    Yesterday Amy Laitinen from New America wrote an excellent article titled “Whatever Happened to the Department’s Competency-Based Education Experiments?” highlighting just such an example.

    About this time two years ago, President Obama went on his college affordability bus tour and unveiled his plan to take on the rising costs of higher education in front of thousands of students at SUNY Buffalo. Promoting innovation and competition was a key part of his plan and President Obama held up competency-based education (CBE) up as one of the “innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank.” The President touted Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America CBE approach. The university “gives course credit based on how well students master the material, not just on how many hours they spend in the classroom,” he explained. “So the idea would be if you’re learning the material faster, you can finish faster, which means you pay less and you save money.” This earned applause from students in the audience as well as from CBE practitioners around the country. [snip]

    The problem is that day was nearly two years ago and the CBE experimental sites are not yet off the ground. (more…)

  • Universities As Innovators That Have Difficulty Adopting Their Own Changes

    George Siemens made an excellent point in his recent blog post after his White House meeting.

    I’m getting exceptionally irritated with the narrative of higher education is broken and universities haven’t changed. This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the “disrupt and transform” learning crowd. Universities are exceptional at innovating and changing.

    While I agree with his primary point about false narratives with simplistic no-change assumptions, I think there is a risk about going too far the other direction. Universities have certainly changed, and there are many innovations within universities, but universities are not very good about diffusing the innovations that they do make. I made this same argument here and here. ((The first article had more of a technology focus, but the same applies to the pedagogical side of change.)) Campus changes are apparent, but too often I see innovative course designs showing real results, but courses in the same department remain unchanged.

    In my opinion Universities are exceptional at innovating, but they are not exceptional at changing.
    (more…)

  • IBM’s Misleading or Just Incorrect National Ad on Student Retention

    Thanks to Chris Edwards for alerting me to this one. In a nutshell, IBM launched a national ad campaign last month that included commercials during Wimbledon on the weekend. They’re spending big money on this campaign about big data, learning analytics, and reducing “dropout rates” [emphasis added below].

    In the US, 3 in 10 college students drop out, but how can you spot who is at risk? The one who lives far from campus? The one who works the night shift? The one with new responsibilities? One thing can’t tell you, but the right combination can. Universities are using IBM Analytics to understand pressures in and out of the classroom. Some expect to cut dropout rates by 25%. IBM Analytics is working to make education smarter every day.

    If you follow the URL listed at the end of the YouTube video and select ‘Education’, you get to the main page that highlights the same video as above. For further explanation: (more…)

  • 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…)