e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: University of Phoenix

  • The Quotable Justin Reich: MOOC research needs to reboot

    Thanks to Audrey Watters I just read a new article in Science Magazine and publicly posted here by Justin Reich, the lead researcher for HarvardX (Harvard’s implementation of edX and associated research team) ((Note that Science Magazine access requires a subscription or purchase or individual article.)). Justin calls out the limitations of current MOOC research that focuses on A/B testing and engagement instead of learning, single-course context, and post hoc analysis with proper course design. While praising the field for making available cleansed data for any type of analysis, his core argument is that we need new approaches that cannot be solved just by research teams.
    Update: Added link to publicly-available DOCX article.

    While the whole article is worth reading, there are quite a few insightful quotes should get past the journal paywall.

    • Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions.
    • We have terabytes of data about what students clicked and very little understanding of what changed in their heads.
    • It does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement.

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  • WWW-based online education turns 20 this summer

    I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t gotten any press, but Internet-based online education turns 20 this summer. There were previous distance education programs that used networks of one form or another as the medium (e.g. University of Phoenix established its “online campus” in 1989), but the real breakthrough is the use of the world wide web (WWW), effectively creating what people most commonly know as “the Internet”.

    To the best of my knowledge (correct me in comments if there are earlier examples), the first accredited school to offer a course over the WWW was the Open University in a pilot Virtual Summer School project in the summer of 1994. The first course was in Cognitive Psychology, offered to 12 students, as described in this paper by Marc Eisenstadt and others involved in the project (the HTML no longer renders):

    In August and September 1994, a Virtual Summer School (VSS) for Open University undergraduate course D309 Cognitive Psychology enabled students to attend an experimental version of summer school ‘electronically’, i.e. from their own homes using a computer and a modem. VSS students were able to participate in group discussions, run experiments, obtain one-to-one tuition, listen to lectures, ask questions, participate as subjects in experiments, conduct literature searches, browse original journal publications, work in project teams, undertake statistical analyses, prepare and submit nicely formatted individual or joint written work, prepare plenary session presentations, and even socialize and chit-chat, all without ever leaving their homes. The term ‘Virtual Summer School’ was used to mean that the software packages supplied to students emulate many aspects of a residential summer school, but without requiring physical attendance. As with many other Open University activities, we feel that face-to-face tuition and peer group interaction would still be preferable if it could be achieved. However, there are sometimes circumstances which preclude physical attendance, so we want to provide the best possible alternative. Virtual Summer School was a first step in this direction. This year, it was only an experimental option for a dozen already-excused students, which gave us a low-risk entry in order to assess the viability of the approach.

    There is even a concept video put together by the Open University at the end of 1994 that includes excerpts of the VSS course.

    And now for your trip down memory lane, I have taken the paper, cleaned up the formatting, and fixed / updated / removed the links that no longer work. The modified paper is below for easier reading: (more…)

  • No, I don’t believe that Harvard or MIT are hiding edX data

    Since my Sunday post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics, there have been a few comments with a common theme about Harvard and MIT perhaps withholding any learner-centered analytics data. As a recap, my argument was:

    Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX data provides no insight into learner patterns of behavior over time. Did the discussion forum posts increase or decrease over time, did video access change over time, etc? We don’t know. There is some insight we could obtain by looking at the last transaction event and number of chapters accessed, but the insight would be limited. But learner patterns of behavior can provide real insights, and it is here where the University of Phoenix (UoP) could teach Harvard and MIT some lessons on analytics.

    Some of the comments that are worth addressing:

    “Non-aggregated microdata (or a “person-click” dataset, see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2013/06/the_person-click_dataset.html ) are much harder (impossible?) to de-identify. So you are being unfair in comparing this public release of data with internal data analytic efforts.”

    “Agreed. The part I don’t understand is how they still don’t realize how useless this all is. Unless they are collecting better data, but just not sharing it openly, hogging it to themselves until it ‘looks good enough for marketing’ or something.”

    “The edX initiative likely has event-level data to analyze. I don’t blame them for not wanting to share that with the world for free though. That would be a very valuable dataset.”

    The common theme seems to be that there must be learner-centered data over time, but Harvard and MIT chose not to release this data either due to privacy or selfish reasons. This is a valid question to raise, but I see no evidence to back up these suppositions.

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  • What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics

    Last week Harvard and MIT released de-identified data from their edX-based MOOCs. Rather than just produce a summary report, the intent of this release was to open up the data and share it publicly. While it is good to see this approach to Open Data, unfortunately the data set is of limited value, and it actually illustrates a key problem with analytics in higher ed. From MIT News description:

    A research team from Harvard University and MIT has released its third and final promised deliverable — the de-identified learning data — relating to an initial study of online learning based on each institution’s first-year courses on the edX platform.

    Specifically, the dataset contains the original learning data from the 16 HarvardX and MITx courses offered in 2012-13 that formed the basis of the first HarvardX and MITx working papers (released in January) and underpin a suite of powerful open-source interactive visualization tools (released in February).

    At first I was eager to explore the data, but I am not sure how much useful insight is possible due to how the data was collected. The data is structured with one student per row for each course they took (taking multiple courses would lead to multiple rows of data). The data columns (pulled from the Person Course Documentation file) are shown below:

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  • The Billion-Dollar Bet on an Adaptive Learning Platform

    Update (2/15/13): Per Apollo Group, the billion-dollar investment mentioned in the Chronicle article (quoted below) refers to total infrastructure – not just the learning platform itself. The total infrastructure includes new CRM, portal, and administrative systems.

    *****

    Earlier this week I wrote about the new patent awarded to the University of Phoenix (the for-profit institution owned by the Apollo Group) for the activity stream within their new online learning platform. The patent gives us a glimpse into a billion-dollar bet that Phoenix is making on this next-generation LMS that will power their move into adaptive learning.

    The University of Phoenix has always been known for using a homegrown LMS, which is understandable given the large size (360,000 students) of the school. In 2009, Phoenix began investing in a completely new learning platform as part of the “Learning Genome Project”. While the company has traditionally been reluctant to describe its internal systems, starting with the 2010 EDUCAUSE conference Phoenix began sharing more information on this project.

    The promise of adaptive learning

    Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed wrote an article on the new learning platform in October 2010 based on information shared by Phoenix’s Director of Data Innovation.

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  • University of Phoenix Patents Adaptive Activity Stream for Its Learning Platform

    The University of Phoenix recently was awarded a patent (#8341148 B1) for an adaptive activity stream related to its online learning platform. From an initial reading of the patent, it appears very broad to me (deja vu all over again). From the press release:

    Apollo Group (APOL), the parent company of University of Phoenix®, today announced that it received a United States patent related to its innovative online classroom platform. The patent was awarded for the University’s new Academic Activity Stream that will consolidate student activities, engagement, and interaction into one unified learning space. The stream will showcase unique personal management features that allow students to more efficiently manage their coursework and classroom experience.

    This patent is the next step in the “Learning Genome Project” – UoP’s major investment in a next-generation online learning platform.  The basic idea of the Academic Activity Stream is to rank information in a user’s activity stream based on individual interests, past history, and learning objectives – rather than merely ranking the items chronologically. From Google’s listing of the patent:

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