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Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. This distinction is important, given Harvard’s founding role in creating the edX organization and $30m pledge of support. The letter is short, so I’ll quote it in full (the signatures are much longer than the letter itself). As the university marks the first anniversary of edX and HarvardX, some faculty are tremendously excited about the potential of HarvardX; others are deeply concerned about the program’s costs and consequences. We appreciate the meetings, town halls, and other arenas in which faculty have been able to discuss HarvardX. But we believe that many critical questions about the relationship of the FAS to HarvardX, and to edX, have not yet been addressed. These questions (which fall outside the remit of the two existing HarvardX faculty committees, most of whose members are not from FAS) range from faculty oversight of HarvardX to the impact online courses will have on the higher education system as a whole. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is directly responsible for the teaching of Harvard undergraduates and Ph.D. students. It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission. Given the rapid pace of development of HarvardX, we believe it is essential to have a formal, sustained, and structured faculty discussion on these issues as soon as possible. We write to request that you appoint a committee of FAS ladder faculty to draft a set of ethical and educational principles that will govern FAS involvement in HarvardX, to be brought before the FAS for a vote in the coming academic year. Note that they request FAS ladder faculty, which means tenure and tenure track faculty and specifically not adjuncts and lecturers. It is possible, however, that the requested committee of ladder faculty could choose to involve adjuncts in the process. In Michael’s recent post on the San Jose State University open letter regarding edX, he called out the missed opportunity for faculty involvement in the future of MOOCs. By ignoring the scholarship of teaching, the department missed an opportunity to engage the MOOC question in a different way. Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community. Researchers collaborate across university boundaries all the time. The same can be true in the scholarship of teaching. The faculty could have demanded access to the edX data and the freedom to adjust the course design. The letter authors seem deeply invested in positioning the edX course as something that is locked down from a third-party commercial vendor. But in reality, the edX course is developed by a faculty member and provided by a university-based non-profit entity. Perhaps the department felt that there wasn’t sufficient opportunity in this particular course design to make a request to have a collaboration worthwhile. But their rhetoric gives no indication that there is any room for such exploration under any circumstances, or indeed that the department has anything to learn about use of educational technology that could lead to either improved outcomes or lower costs. The Harvard letter, in my opinion, takes this more reasoned approach of viewing MOOCs as experiments in “teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community”. Let’s hope that media coverage of the Harvard letter keeps this balanced view in mind rather than seeing another example to pit faculty members against the big three MOOC providers. The post Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX) appeared first on e-Literate.

Sometimes one sees the wrong icon next to a file in the Resources tool, this may also have the side effect of forcing the download of a file rather than opening it in the browser. This can be quite annoying. I asked WebLearn developer Matthew Buckett about this and here is what he had to say about PDFs that were incorrectly attributed. To fix the issue go into the Resources tool and for every file with the problem click on “Edit Details (Properties)” then scroll to the bottom of the page to find the File Type field and click “Change File Type”. Then from the first drop-down list select “application” and from the second select “pdf”. Then click save. The file should then download/open in all browser fine. Background/Reasons: When a file is uploaded to WebLearn we get some additional bits of information as well as the actual file. One of those pieces of information is the MIME type, which is a value saying what the format of the contents of the file are. When file was uploaded into WebLearn, the user’s computer told WebLearn that the contents of the files were ‘text/unknown’, WebLearn saves this value and then when anyone download/opens the file the value is sent back to the browser to help it understand it. This mechanism allows files to open correctly when they don’t have a known extension. To address the above problem, the user needs to fix the MIME type for all PDF files on his computer which should stop this problem from occurring in the future. One might be able to do this using the Finder or an application like http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/ Some browsers don’t trust the value in the MIME type and will also look at the file extension to determine how to handle it so the problem may not be evident with all browsers. Once the file is downloaded and saved to disk the MIME type information is lost and so the operating system uses the file extension to determine how to open the file. Another way to workaround the problem is to put the files to upload in a zipfile then upload the zipfile and expand the zipfile in WebLearn. This way there isn’t any MIME type information about the PDF files when the ZIP is expanded so WebLearn should use the .pdf extension to set the MIME type and so get it correct.

As we announced the other day, Phil and I have written a report sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation responding to California SB 520, a.k.a. the “MOOC bill,” and making some recommendations for the governor and legislature to consider as they attempt to tackle the bottleneck course problem in the current budget discussions. You can see more about the report on 20 Million Minds website here. Ry Rivard of Insider Higher Education has a good write-up of the paper here. Phil and I will doing a CrowdHall event Tuesday through Friday of next week. CrowdHall basically lets anyone ask questions (asynchronously) and then have participants vote up the best questions for responses by the “speakers.” I have no idea how well it will work, but I’m interested in trying it. We will be serializing the paper here on e-Literate during those days, posting a new section and some commentary each day to try to stimulate discussion. The event starts at 9 AM PST and ends at 2 PM PST each day (although how much those times mean during an asynchronous event is not clear to me). The post Right to Access Report Links and Upcoming Event appeared first on e-Literate.

Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the interview, and this is an area that needs more attention – local educational technology support for faculty innovation, with an emphasis on faculty sharing best practices. The summer institute is May 28th – 31st. I was interviewed by Richard Gordon and Paul Hyde, and some of the key topics we explored: Not everyone is a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education – what the heck is a MOOC? How do MOOCs affect faculty teaching in a bricks-and-mortar university? What are the completion rates of MOOCs and what are the student types? Are there applications beyond higher education? Why is there such significant pushback against MOOCs lately? What disciplines beyond science and engineering are using MOOCs? Here is link to the U Delaware radio interview - audio only. It’s about a half hour in length, but with some cool NPR-sounding music to kick it off. I have also added some graphics and created a video of the interview. Click here to view the embedded video. The post MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware appeared first on e-Literate.

2013年5月19日 シリーズ：プラグイン week2 「聖霊によって活かされる」 メッセンジャー： 大窪秀幸牧師 / Pastor Hide メッセージノート：　http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会　大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp

2013年5月19日 シリーズ：Eve and Adam week2 「女性が信じてしまっている二つのウソ」part2 メッセンジャー： 大窪秀幸牧師 / Pastor Hide メッセージノート：　http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会　大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp

We are pleased to announce the publication of our white paper on California’s bottleneck course issue. Many thanks to the paper’s sponsor, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, for giving us the support and freedom to write exactly what we believe. If there is anything that you find wrong or objectionable in the paper, then blame us. The central idea in the paper is that California should adopt the principle that students have a right to educational access. There is a fundamental difference between saying that we should do whatever we can to give students access and saying that we have an obligation to enable students to exercise their right to access. And that change of frame is critical to solving the problem of bottleneck courses. The current incarnation of SB 520, which we have written about here repeatedly, has been accused by its detractors as being a potential vehicle for gutting and privatizing California’s public higher education. We believe that concern is legitimate. However, in the context of a larger bill supporting the students’ right to access, it could be not only positive but essential as path of last resort. As part of supporting every citizen’s right to due process when accused of a crime, the government is required to provide access to a public defender. But few people who have financial means are likely to choose a public defender over a private attorney because private attorneys, by and large, have access to resources (including time for individual attention) that public defenders do not. Likewise, we believe that access to third-party online courses disconnected from a student’s home institution is a poor solution to the student’s access problem. The only worse solution is not to have one at all, which is the current situation. If Californians believe that students should have a right to access, then they must provide a means of last resort for students to exercise that right. But the best solution would be to eliminate bottleneck courses altogether, which is why much of our proposal centers on providing mechanisms and funding to empower faculty members, campuses, and systems to solve these problems within the California public education system, where students have the benefit of the campus support network and expertise of local faculty. Even the main funding for the third-party course provisions, which we characterize as the “safety valve” of the plan, would go toward developing infrastructure that would be equally useful to support students taking courses from other campuses within the California systems. If the faculty and administrators will lead an effort to solve the bottleneck course problem organically, with appropriate support from the state, then the actual use of the safety valve option by students could become a rarity. We acknowledge that technology is not the only possible solution to the bottleneck course problem; nor do we assume that the underlying budget challenges should be accepted at face value. We have written about technology as one avenue to solve the problem because educational technology is what we know about and what we were asked to write about. None of what we suggest precludes discussions about allocation of funding in college budgets, levels of state funding support, allocation of faculty time to lower-division courses, or other relevant questions. We believe strongly that students should have a right to educational access and that technology can be one useful tool in enabling them to exercise that right. We also believe that the educators in California’s public college and university system are still critical enablers of that right and have a central role to play in making that ideal a reality. And we think there is real value in bringing together educators across the state to focus on sensible application of technology to solve a real educational problem. The culture and collaboration, knowledge and infrastructure that could be created to solve the access problem could also be applied to problems such as improving completion rates, improving course quality, and lowering tuition costs. You can read the white paper here. The post California and the Right to Educational Access appeared first on e-Literate.

Last month, I wrote this narrow defense of automated essay grading, hoping to clear the air on a new and controversial technology. In that post’s prolific comments section, Laura Gibbs made a comment echoing what I’ve heard from every teacher I speak to. I am waiting for someone to show me a real example of this “useful supplement” provided by the computer that is responding to natural human language use – I understand what you want it to be, but I would contend that natural human language use is so complex (complex for a computer to apprehend) that trying to give writing mechanics feedback on spontaneously generated student writing will lead only to confusion for the students. When we talk about machine learning being used to automatically grade writing, most people don’t know what that looks like. Because they don’t know the technology, they make it up. As far as I can tell, this is based on a combination of decades-old technology like Microsoft Word’s green grammar squiggles, clever new applications like Apple’s Siri personal assistant, and downright fiction, like Tony Stark’s snarky talking suits. What you get from this cross is a weird and incompetent artificial intelligence pointing out commas and giving students high grades for hiding the word “defenestration” in an essay. My cofounder at LightSIDE Labs, David Adamson, taught in a high school for six years. If we were endeavoring to build something that was this unhelpful for teachers, he would have walked out a long time ago. In fact, though, David is a researcher in his own right. David’s Ph.D. research isn’t as focused on machine learning and algorithms as my own; instead, his work brings him into Pittsburgh public schools, talking with students and teachers, and putting technology where it can make a difference. In this post, rather than focus on essay evaluation and helping students with writing – which will be the subject of future posts – I’m going to explore the things he’s already doing in classrooms. Building computers that talk to students David builds conversational agents. These agents are computer programs that sit in chatrooms for small-group discussion in class projects, looking by all appearances like a moderator or TA logged in elsewhere. They’re not human, however – they’re totally automated. They have a small library of lines that they can inject into the discussion, which can be automatically modified slightly in context. They use language technology, including machine learning as well as simpler techniques, to process what students are saying as they work together. The agent has to decide what to say and when. Those pre-scripted lines aren’t thrown in arbitrarily. In fact, they’re descended from decades of research into education and getting classroom discussion right. This line of research is called Accountable Talk, and in fact there’s an entire course coming up on Coursera about how to use this theory productively. The whole thing is built on fairly basic principles: First, students should be accountable to each other in a conversation. If you’re only sharing your own ideas and not building off of the ideas of others, then it’s just a bunch of people thinking alone, who happen to be in a chatroom together. You don’t get anything out of the discussion. Next, your thought process should be built off of connecting the dots, making logical conclusions, and reasoning about the connections between facts. Finally, those facts that you’re basing your decision-making on should be explicit. They should come from explicit sources and you should be able to point to them in your argument for why your beliefs are correct. David’s agents are framed around Accountable Talk, doing what teachers know leads to a good discussion. Instead of giving students instructions or trying to evaluate whether they were right or wrong, they merely ask good questions at the right times. Agents were trained to look for places where students made a productive, substantial claim – the type of jumping-off point that Accountable Talk encourages. He never tried to correct those claims, though; he didn’t even evaluate whether they were right or wrong. He was just looking for the chance to make a difference in the discussion. He used those automated predictions as a springboard for collaborative discussion. Agents were programmed to try to match student statements to existing facts about a specific chemistry topic. “So, let me get this right. You’re saying…” More often than not, he also programmed the agents to lean on other students for help. “[Student 2], can you repeat what [Student 1] just said, in your own words? Do you agree or disagree? Why?” Automated prompts like this leave the deep thinking to students. Instead of following computer instructions by rote, the students were being pushed into deeper discussions. Agents give the authority to students, asking them to lead and not taking on the role of a teacher and looming over them. Sometimes computers fail In the real world, intervention to help students requires confidence that you’re giving good advice. If David’s agents always spout unhelpful nonsense, students will learn to ignore them. Perhaps worst of all, if the agent tries to reward students for information it thinks is correct, a wrong judgment means students get literally the opposite of helpful teaching. With all of this opportunity for downside, reliability seems like it would be the top priority. How can you build a system that’s useful for intervening in small groups if it makes big mistakes? This is mostly accounted for by crafting the right feedback, designing agents that are tailored to the technology’s strengths and avoiding weaknesses. In large part this comes down to avoiding advice that’s so clear-cut that big mistakes are possible. Grammar checking and evaluations of accuracy within a sentence are doomed to fail almost from the start. If your goal with a machine learning system is to correct every mistake that every student makes, you’re going to need to be very confident, and because this is a statistics game we’re playing, that kind of technology is going to disappoint. Moreover, even when you get it right, what has a student gained by being told to fix a run-on sentence? At best, an improvement at small-scale grammar understanding. This is not going to sweep anyone off their feet. By basing his conversational agents on the tenets of a good discussion, David was able to gain a lot of ground with what is, frankly, pretty run-of-the-mill machine learning. Whiz-bang technology is secondary to technology that does something that helps. When the system works, it skips the grammar lessons. Instead, it jumps into the conversation at just the right time to encourage students to think for themselves. Sometimes, though, the agent misfires. When using machine learning, this is something you just have to accept. What we care about is that this doesn’t hurt students or start teaching wrong ideas. So let’s think about the cases where an agent can make a wrong decision: first, where the agent could have given feedback but didn’t, and second, where the agent gives the wrong feedback at the wrong time. First, the easy case. Sometimes a student will say something brilliant and the agent will fail to catch it. Here, the balance of authority between agent and student matters. If students get used to the idea that the agent is a teacher, they’ll be looking for it to tell them they got every answer right. This is a danger zone for us – with statistical machine learning, we don’t want to back ourselves into a corner where the system has to make judgments every single time. Sometimes, we’ll be uncertain. If an agent misses its cue and the students expect a teacher’s authoritative judgment of correctness, the group will flounder when the agent misses a beat, or take the discussion into their own hands and leave the agent in the dust. Let’s see what that looks like in practice. Here’s a transcript from an earlier study, when conversational agents weren’t as heavily rooted in the theory of Accountable Talk: Tutor: You should now move on to discussing Condition C. Tutor: [Student A], now would be a good time to ask [Student B] to build on what [Student C] is saying. [Student B]: I’m so confused! [Student A]: [Student B], would you like to build onto what [Student C] is saying? And me too! Tutor: When you agree, write down your predictions on your worksheet. This is dysfunctional; the tutor isn’t asking discussion-generating questions, and it’s pushing forward regardless of context. Focusing on the task single-mindedly doesn’t give students room to think.   By taking on the role of facilitator, though, the agent’s comments aren’t expected every time. We can use the system to chime in with an Accountable Talk question when we’re highly confident that the machine learning system is making the right prediction, but if the system stays silent, the students won’t even notice it’s missing; the agent is purely there to help scaffold learning, rather than judge correctness. When you’re augmenting teaching, rather than replacing humans entirely, you can afford to be cautious. Look at how the agent interacts when we start asking questions that are better suited to what we know we can do: [Student D]: ok, boiling pt will go up and vdW will go up for all of them consecutively… right? Tutor: Do you concur with [Student D]? Why, or why not? [Student E]: hmm not necessarily [Student F]: area goes up for each [Student E]: would it? [Student E]: im not sure [Student D]: yea for sure area goes up [Student F]: dipole increases first one In this example excerpt the tutor didn’t give an instruction or evaluate anything that the first quoted student line. It simply asked a basic question in response to machine learning evaluating that spot as a good opening. The comments from these new agents use Accountable Talk principles, and get student groups discussing ideas. Of course, these systems aren’t perfect. What we’re finding out, though, is that we can frame the discussion right for automated assessment by not trying to make our automated system the perfect arbiter of truth. What I’m describing isn’t a dire portrait of machines taking over the education system. It’s agents contributing meaningfully to learning by cautiously intervening when appropriate, using machine learning for educated guessing about when it’s time to get students to think more deeply. These agents are tireless and can be placed into every discussion in every online small group at all times – something a single teacher in a large class will never be able to do. The results with these agents were clear: students learned significantly more than students who didn’t get the support. Moreover, when students were singled out and targeted by agent questioning, they participated more and led a more engaged, more assertive conversation with the other students.  The agent didn’t have to give students remedial grammar instructions to be valuable; the data showed that the students took their own initiative, with the agents merely pushing them in the right direction. Machine learning didn’t have to be perfect. Instead, machine learning figured out the right places to ask questions, and worked towards making students think for themselves. This is how machine learning can help students. For helping students, automated feedback works. We should be exercising caution with machine learning. Skeptics are right to second guess interventions from technologists who aren’t working with students. The goal is often to replace teachers, not help them, especially with the promise of tantalizingly quick cost savings. Yes – if you want to make standardized testing cheaper, machine learning works. I don’t to dismiss this entirely – we can, in fact, save schools and states a lot of money on existing standardized tests – but if that’s as far as your imagination takes you, you’re missing the point. What’s important isn’t that we can test students more, and more quickly, with less money. Focus on this: we can actually help students. Not every student is going to get one-on-one time daily with a trained writing tutor. Many are never going to see a writing tutor individually in their entire education. For these students, machine learning is stepping in, with instant help. These systems aren’t going to make the right decision every time in every sentence. We need to know that, and we need to work with it. Rather than toss out technology promising the moon, look carefully at what it can do. Shift expectations as necessary. In David’s case, the shift was about authority. He empowered students to take up their own education, and chimed in when it saw an opportunity; it positioned the automated system as guide rather than dictator. This goes way beyond grading, and way beyond grammar checking. Machine learning helps students when teachers aren’t there. Getting automated feedback right leads to students thinking, discussing ideas, and learning more – and that’s what matters. In my next post, I’d like to launch off from here and talk about what these lessons mean not just for discussion, but for writing. Stay tuned. A last note The work I described from David is part of an extended series of more than 20 papers and journal articles from my advisor at Carnegie Mellon, Carolyn Rosé, and her students. While I won’t give a bibliography for a decade of research, some of the newest work is published as: “Intensification of Group Knowledge Exchange with Academically Productive Talk Agents,” in this year’s CSCL conference. “Enhancing Scientific Reasoning and Explanation Skills with Conversational Agents,” submitted to IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. “Towards Academically Productive Talk Supported by Conversational Agents,” in the 2012 conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. I’ve asked David to watch this post’s comments section, and I’m sure he’ll be happy to directly answer any questions you have. The post Getting students useful feedback from machine learning appeared first on e-Literate.

The following questions emerged at the lunchtime session on the Site Info tool on 14 May 2013: Q: How do you delete a site? A: Good question – this option is not part of the Site Info ‘dashboard’. To delete a site, you need to remove it from the hierarchy and delete it. Both operations can be done at the same time from the Hierarchy Manager (small menu on the lower left side > Arrange site). Go to the desired site; click on ‘Arrange site’ on the lower left menu; click on ‘Remove site’; select the box ‘Also delete the site’; click on ‘Confirm remove site’. If you do not see the Hieararchy Manager (small menu on lower left side), you will need to speak to your Local WebLearn Coordinator to give you the required permissions. Q: Do site participants receive an email when a site is deleted? A: No – so it is not necessary to first remove them as site participants before you delete the site. Q: Do site participants receive an email when creating internal sub-groups? A: No – so you can create, edit or remove internal sub-groups without any notifications being sent. Q: External users (without an Oxford single singon account) – how do they get access to a WebLearn site and how do they get their login details? A: WebLearn allows you as the site owner to add either Oxford University particpants, or anyone else, simply by using their email address. If the new participant is an external user (e.g. a research collaborator at another university, a visiting expert etc.), they will automatically receive a one-time system-generated email message giving them a link to activiate their account and create their password. They then log in to WebLearn by clicking on the ‘Other Users’ login link. You can try this out by adding yourself to a WebLearn site with your external email address (e.g. gmail, yahoo etc.), give yourself the ‘access’ role, and then log on as an external user to see how the site operates from the access point of view. (This gives a more authentic experience than using the ‘Switch to access user’ toggle option.) Q: When might you want to make someone ‘Inactive’ in your site? A: You might be testing something new in the site – instead of unpublising it, you could make the participants temporarily ‘Inactive’ which means that it is as if they have been removed from the site. Later you can make them ‘Active’ again. Another scenario is if you have added a bulk ‘Participant Group’ – you cannot remove individuals in the bulk group, but you can make someone Inactive if you know that they have left the group or course.

Jill Fresen has sent me this: Every member of Oxford University has their own personal ‘cloud’ in WebLearn, called ‘My Workspace’. You can enter your contact details, upload your photo into your profile, and make connections with other WebLearn users. You also have a personal file storage area (max 100 Mb) which you can use to back up files, access them from any other computer, or build a personal web page. Come along to the Learn at Work day session entitled “WebLearn: An online space for learning and collaboration” at IT Services, 13 Banbury Road on 23 May 2013 from 3:00 to 4:00 pm. More information and bookings at: http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TLW12

This is going to be a more personal blog post than I typically make here at e-Literate. The open letter from San José State University’s philosophy department in protest of the edX JusticeX course being taught at SJSU is getting a lot of attention, as is the follow-up statement from the SJSU faculty senate. I have some concerns with both of these letters—particularly the one from the philosophy department—but before I get into them, I’d like to emphasize my points of agreement and solidarity with the department: As a former philosophy major and a former teacher of philosophy courses to seventh and eighth graders, I strongly believe that a course in social justice is critical to every American’s education. I also strongly agree that, in order for such a course to be effective, it must be up-to-date, relevant to the students, and involve in-depth facilitated discussion. I agree that there is a bit of a bait-and-switch going on, possibly unintentionally, with the rhetoric about MOOCs providing superior pedagogy over lecture classes (which is probably somewhat true) and then moving to swap out discussion classes for MOOCs instead. I agree that some MOOC fans (though by no means all of them) have simplistic notions of how MOOCs can make university education cheaper without thinking through the consequences either to the quality of education or the fiscal health of the colleges and universities that still provide tremendous value to our nation and our culture. I agree that intellectual diversity is very important, particularly when discussing complex issues that are essential to a functioning democracy, and that the potential for an intellectual monoculture is a concern worth taking very seriously. While I have no knowledge of the negotiations between edX and SJSU, I strongly agree that such partnerships should be conceived and implemented with active consultation and collaboration with faculty unless there is exceptionally strong justification to do otherwise. Despite all this common ground on values that are dear to me, I find aspects of the department’s letter to be deeply problematic. To begin with, there is this: Good quality online courses and blended courses (to which we have no objections) do not save money, but pre-packaged ones do, and a lot. That statement is demonstrably false. Good quality online courses and blended courses can, in fact, save money. How do we know? For starters, the National Center for Academic Transformation has a long list of course redesign projects they have been doing in collaboration with colleges in universities since 1999, many of which have achieved substantial cost savings. And some of them actually achieved substantial improvement in outcomes while achieving substantial cost savings. Nor is NCAT alone. There is a growing body of empirically backed academic literature showing that we can teach more students more effectively for less money across a variety of subjects. Some subjects are easier to redesign than others. But cost savings in high-quality courses is possible as a general proposition (and does not require open content licensing, by the way). The SJSU philosophy department’s blanket denial of this possibility is not credible. As a result, the authors of the letter are also less credible when they write, In addition to providing students with an opportunity to engage with active scholars, expertise in the physical classroom, sensitivity to its diversity, and familiarity with one’s own students is just not available in a one-size-fits-all blended course produced by an outside vendor….When a university such as ours purchases a course from an outside vendor, the faculty cannot control the design or content of the course; therefore we cannot develop and teach content that fits with our overall curriculum and is based on both our own highly developed and continuously renewed competence and our direct experience of our students’ abilities and needs. There appears to be a significant disconnect here. On the one hand, the department argues (correctly, in my view) that philosophy students gain great benefit from “the opportunity to engage with active scholars.” On the other hand, they assert that the philosophy department has “expertise in the physical classroom” and a “highly developed and continuously renewed competence” despite the overwhelming likelihood that most of the faculty have not had significant opportunities to engage with active scholars in pedagogy-related fields. They could have made their case just as effectively without foreclosing the possibility of improving on what they already do. As the letter from the SJSU Faculty Association notes in response to the improved completion rates of the edX course, The pedagogical infrastructure and work that has gone into the preparation of the edX material could easily be replicated if SJSU made a commitment to pedagogy and made training in pedagogy central to all faculty. This is a defensible argument that the philosophy department could have made. But it didn’t. Instead, it implicitly denied the existence of the scholarship of teaching and explicitly blamed the university’s financial issues on “industry” for “demanding that public universities devote their resources to providing ready-made employees, while at the same time…resisting paying the taxes that support public education.” The collective effect of these rhetorical moves is to absolve the department of all responsibility for addressing the real problems the university is facing. By ignoring the scholarship of teaching, the department missed an opportunity to engage the MOOC question in a different way. Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community. Researchers collaborate across university boundaries all the time. The same can be true in the scholarship of teaching. The faculty could have demanded access to the edX data and the freedom to adjust the course design. The letter authors seem deeply invested in positioning the edX course as something that is locked down from a third-party commercial vendor. But in reality, the edX course is developed by a faculty member and provided by a university-based non-profit entity. Perhaps the department felt that there wasn’t sufficient opportunity in this particular course design to make a request to have a collaboration worthwhile. But their rhetoric gives no indication that there is any room for such exploration under any circumstances, or indeed that the department has anything to learn about use of educational technology that could lead to either improved outcomes or lower costs. Equally disturbing is the tendency in both letters to dismiss the fiscal crisis as something caused solely by greedy capitalists. It’s worth requoting the earlier referenced comment from the philosophy department letter here: Industry is demanding that public universities devote their resources to providing ready-made employees, while at the same time they are resisting paying the taxes that support public education. To begin with, “industry” isn’t alone in demanding that public universities devote their resources to producing employable graduates. Students and their parents are asking for it too, as are individual human taxpayers. On this last point, I am not a Californian, but I understand that individual human taxpayers have an unusually direct say regarding tax rates in the state of California. The purpose of education as a public good is a serious and complicated question that deserves more careful treatment from people who should know better. Nor are taxes the only issue. While it is true that there has been progressive defunding of public colleges and universities in the United States, it is also true that tuition costs have been rising dramatically across the country in private as well as public schools. And it is true that the public colleges and universities in California in particular are struggling with unanticipated swelling enrollments as they strive to meet the as-yet-unfulfilled moral imperative of universal access to education. Given all of this, it is not a morally defensible position to simply point the finger at the rich guys and say, “It’s their fault. Make them fix it.” To the degree that course redesign can positively impact student access to education, faculty have a moral obligation to be leading the charge. And from a strategic perspective, they are more likely to prevent dumb ideas—such as gutting quality residential education in favor of least-common-denominator, video-driven xMOOCs—from taking hold. But perhaps the worst aspect of the simplistic finger pointing is the way in which it pollutes the civic discourse. It encourages individual stakeholders to harden into an “us vs. them” position that reduces the likelihood of citizens coming together to solve real, hard problems that are deeply intwined with issues of social justice. Here’s an example of a comment made on this blog in response to a post about the California SB 520 bill: Remember that when the Nazis led the people into the gas chamber they told them that it was a refreshing shower after a long train ride. Do not be fooled! This sweet sounding bill is the gas chamber of good education in California. Once we are in the questions will be pointless. As the pellets drop we will realize we should have questioned things sooner. Setting aside the fact that the only justifiable use of genocide as an analogy is when talking about another genocide, this kind of rhetoric is enormously damaging to the possibility of a productive dialectic regarding how to solve the very real and complicated problems that our system of higher education faces, including both the need to increase access and the complexities of funding that imperative. And, sadly, this comment was written by a member of the SJSU philosophy department. The post Political Philosophy appeared first on e-Literate.

So MindTap just won a CODiE award for “Best Post-secondary Personalized Learning Solution.” In and of itself, this isn’t a big deal. No offense intended to current or prior winners, but the CODiEs often feel like awards for “Best Instant Coffee” or “Best New Technology Product by an Important Sponsor of Our Awards Program.” They’re not exactly signals of breakthrough educational product design. But I’m glad that the award was given in this case because I think MindTap does represent an important innovation that addresses some of the trends that we’ve been blogging about here at e-Literate (which was one of the reasons that I was enticed to work on MindTap at Cengage for a while). MindTap is not a “personalized learning solution.” While it does allow students to do things like integrate their Evernote accounts and choose whether they want to read or listen to texts, the level of personalization for the learners is not terribly different from other products on the market. (And it certainly is nowhere near as radical as the vision for a Personalized Learning Environment which came from the UK’s JISC and elsewhere, and from which terms like “personalized learning solution” and “personalized learning experience” have been bastardized). Nor are there adaptive analytics or other sorts of machine-driven personalization in the product at this time. Rather, the key differentiator in the current incarnation of MindTap is the way in which it creates a more refined and complete learning experience out of the box while still enabling faculty to customize those experiences to the needs of their students in pretty significant and, in some cases, new ways. This is exactly where the textbook, LMS, and MOOC markets are all headed, and MindTap got there first. The Problem to be Solved In order to understand the value of a product like MindTap, it’s important to understand where textbook publishers do and do not compete. You’re not going to see a lot of MindTap-style products for courses like “Advanced Topics in International Trade Policy,” “Research in Genetics,” “Greek Film,” or “Intermediate Killer Shark Genre.” These smaller courses are relatively uninteresting to textbook publishers because they don’t have the scale necessary to generate significant revenues, and they are also better suited to hand-crafted course designs that are tailored to the strengths of the particular professor doing the teaching and can be highly tailored to the needs and interests of the students in the class. Rather, the courses in question are more like “Introduction to Psychology,” “General Biology I,” “Microeconomics,” or “Survey of Western Civilization.” (English Composition is an anomaly in this categorization because of the way it is taught.) These courses are generally taught in large lecture halls with little or no writing—and when there is writing, it is often graded quickly on a narrow range of criteria by overworked graduate students—and relatively generic syllabi (particularly in non-elite institutions). A lot of the heated debate over whether college is “broken” revolves around these sorts of classes without ever explicitly defining the scope of the problem. Those who say school is broken and need to be disrupted tend to argue as if all college courses are giant, boring lecture courses. Those who argue against the “school is broken” meme tend to characterize these large lecture-centric courses as exceptions. Neither characterization is entirely accurate. On one hand, there are huge swaths of courses in just about any college catalog that are not large lecture courses. On the other hand, because the large lecture courses are concentrated in core curriculum and core major classes, most students have to take a handful of these courses in order to graduate. Regardless of how pervasive or rare you think these courses are, everybody seems to agree that they are not terribly effective. But what should be done about the problem? Shrinking the class size is simply not going to happen, given both budget realities and the moral imperative to increase access to education. And yet, the current situation is bad not only for the students but also for the instructors. Keep in mind that the people teaching these survey courses are disproportionately either junior faculty who are doing all kinds of other duties to earn tenure or adjuncts who are working unreasonable course loads just to make ends meet. They generally don’t have a lot of time to either carefully craft a course or give students a lot of (or any) individual attention. They often have little choice but to take what the publisher is giving them as their course outline and run with it. In and of itself, the direct adoption of a publisher’s curriculum isn’t necessarily bad for many of these courses. The whole idea of a core course is that it helps all students getting a particular degree or a particular major to master certain competencies that they should have. There is a strong argument for consistency of curriculum across core courses. But the current situation neither guarantees consistency of curriculum nor saves the instructor time for either thoughtful customization of the curriculum or any other purpose. There is still a lot of hand assembly required to pull together reading assignments, assessments, slides and lecture notes, and so on. It is generally not a creative process because there is little time for creativity, but it is nevertheless a labor-intensive process and one that is prone to introduce variation in hitting those core competencies without any checks or even necessarily a lot of reflection on it. A Better Compromise If instructors are going to adopt a third-party course curriculum anyway, then we should at least use technology to remove the hand assembly. Why not provide the readings, multimedia, assignments and assessments, neatly integrated with a basic syllabus, into one ready-to-use digital package for the students? At its most basic, this is what “courseware” is and what MindTap does. It provides students and instructors with a ready-to-go complete course structure with all the materials and assessments placed in a logical and easily navigable order. Joel Spolsky once defined poor user interface design as forcing users to make choices that they don’t care about. That is also an apt description for 80% of the pre-semester course preparation process that instructors go through with these big survey courses. Pre-assembling the elements of the vanilla version of the course frees up the instructors’ time to focus on the customizations that they actually do care about. To begin with, the course structure is already assembled and visible, which makes it easier for the instructor to think about its total shape. Removing unwanted content or changing content order is trivially easy, making the roughing in of the course structure very quick. But things get really interesting when you start looking at adding to the learning path structure in MindTap rather than just moving or deleting things. In ed tech discussions, we tend to talk about APIs as if the main differentiation is having them versus not having them. Can you or can you not integrate Google Docs into a course? But in reality, the specifics of the integration can make an enormous difference in how practically useful the added functionality is to teachers and students. Do you want to make a folder of your documents (like your syllabus) available to the students at all times in the course with one or two clicks, or do you want to insert your own supplemental document right into the course reading, zero clicks away for the student and on their default navigation path? These two types of integration serve fundamentally different purposes in the course. In MindTap, you can do both and more. And importantly, making these different customizations is intuitive and almost trivially easy. Radical customization of the course structure is very much possible. But both because there is far less instructor time wasted with hand assembly of course elements and because customizations are visible and visualizable in the learning path structure, the percentage of time spent on meaningful instructional activities, whether that’s course customization or student interaction, is likely to be higher. For this reason, the MindApp model and the learning path structure are MindTap’s crown jewels. Table Stakes Of course, MindTap doesn’t have a monopoly on useful courseware platform design. For example, WileyPLUS enables instructors to see which course materials and assessments are associated with which learning objectives. This helps instructors to align what they’re teaching and assessing on to what they think the student should be learning. More importantly, none of these innovations from any of the platforms are going to magically change poor large lecture classes into great educational experiences. The key to solving that problem is not the technology by itself but the learning design that it enables. The classroom flipping craze is a craze precisely because it is a learning design that can improve the pedagogical impact of these large survey classes. But anyone who has actually tried to flip their class will tell you that it’s not easy to do well. Faculty need pedagogical models other than the ones that they learned from their own professors, including the practical tips and support necessary to make those models work in the real world. They need course designs based on learning science and collected experience of innovators, and supported by technology. The MindTap platform doesn’t provide that. No technology platform does. And as far as I can tell, Cengage is not yet designing courseware for MindTap that even attempts to do this. But in order to accomplish the bigger goal, we first need to strike a new balance regarding course design customization. It’s not a question of “more” versus “less.” There will always be times when it is wise to allow a skilled instructor to tune a course. But there needs to be more of a sophisticated collaboration between the individual instructor, a curriculum design team (whether that team works for a textbook publisher or a university), and the other instructors teaching the course at the same institution in order to arrive at better pedagogical approaches that can be adopted and adapted to best effect by individual teachers. In order to accomplish that, you need to start with a combination of platform and content that makes meaningless course assembly unnecessary and meaningful course customization both easy and visible. This is what we mean at e-Literate when we write about “courseware.” And at the moment, MindTap is the best example I know of what a next-generation courseware platform will look like. The post Cengage MindTap and the Evolution of Courseware appeared first on e-Literate.

2013年5月12日 シリーズ：Eve and Adam week1 「女性が信じてしまっている二つのウソ」 メッセンジャー： 大窪秀幸牧師 / Pastor Hide メッセージノート：　http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会　大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp

2013年5月12日 シリーズ：プラグイン week1 「キリストにつながる二つの鍵」 メッセンジャー： 大窪秀幸牧師 / Pastor Hide メッセージノート：　http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会　大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp

2013年4月28日 シリーズ： 「神様の祝福のもとに生きる」 メッセンジャー： ヘザー・マカロック宣教師 / Heather McCullough メッセージノート：　http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会　大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp

IT Services, with the 4 academic divisions, have developed a tool where graduate students and post-doctoral researcher can search for short courses and then request a place. This talk will give a walk-through of the tool, explain how data is gathered and stored, the various data feeds that are created by the tool, and the ways in which students can request places on courses. It is suitable for training providers and people of a technical bent. This takes place in IT Services (Banbury Rd) on Monday 13th May between 12.30 and 1.20 Booking is required: https://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TM13G

Note: I am not speaking for Blackboard in this post and I am not speaking for the University of Michigan in this post. The opinions in this are my own. Just over a year ago, in addition to my full-time job as a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, I became a part-time employee of Blackboard, Inc. as with a title of Sakai Chief Strategist (My Blog Post / Press Release) I figure it is probably a good time to give a bit of a status update as to how things went this past year and what I did. A little more context on my decision / strategy You can go back and read all my motivation, rationalization, and plans from my blog posts from late March and early April of last year. While all I said was completely true – there was one small detail in my motivation for going to Blackboard that I somewhat understated a year ago. You can see a running theme of Sakai CLE resources in those posts but not up-front and explicit. Now a year later I can be much more explicit. Early in 2012, things were looking really bleak for the Sakai CLE. The progress toward the 2.9 release had slowed and eventually stopped. I was really worried that if Sakai 2.9 (most importantly Rutgers LessonBuilder) did not ship that Sakai 2.8 would not be able to hold its market share because of Sakai 2.8’s lack of structured and sequenced content. But I felt that 2.9 with its new portal and LessonBuilder would be a solid and competent LMS that would have a long life in the US and around the world. I did not want to quit so close to the finish line. If you recall, Sakai 2.9 was in *beta* when the TCC cancelled all further release activity. In January – March 2012, I felt that we were seeing the end of Sakai before our eyes. In this blog post from March 31 last year – I get a little testy and call out the Sakai community for its lack of investment in the commons. You can see my frustration, anger, and fear with respect to Sakai’s long-term survival in that post. Michael Chasen was willing to give me money and resources to invest in Sakai so we could finish and ship Sakai 2.9. He would put little or no constraints on how I spent the money – it was mine to spend as I saw fit. It was not enough money to take over Sakai development and release management but I gave him a figure that I felt would get things moving again when added to the rest of the Sakai community resources. You can look at the Sakai 2.9.0 release cycle document to see that 2.9.0 was finished November 12, 2012. The code freeze and first release tag (A01) had been created 13 months earlier on October 17, 2011. I want to make it really clear that many people deserve credit for the 2.9.0 release. My contribution and Blackboard’s contribution to 2.9.0 was non-trivial but many others contributed much more than Blackboard or me. It was a cross-community effort and I was only a part of that effort – which is as it should be. What Got Done? How Did You Spend Your Time? How Did You Spend the Money Here is a list in no particular order. I bought food, drink, stickers, and shirts for community leadership. Sorry – but this is important. For those of you who have been in Sakai from the beginning, you may remember situations where I used the University of Michigan Credit card (backed by grant funds) to pick up the tab for 40-50 people at a time. If you are going to volunteer your spare time to doing hundreds of hours Quality Assurance or software development – then *someone* should at least buy you a meal or two to say “thanks”. I don’t hesitate to use my Blackboard American Express Card to pick up the tab when I am sitting at a table with a bunch of amazing community volunteers. I took the entire TCC and a few guests to Ruth Chris at the June 2012 meeting. I turned in an expense of $3700 for the TCC dinner. It was approved with no questions asked. It was a bargain given the amount of work that the people eating those steaks have contributed over the years. I contracted with developers in the Sakai community from June 2012 – February 2013 to work on resolving any and every outstanding Sakai 2.9 issue they could find. When I paid these contractors I did not ask that they make any public statements about the source of their funds. This was not about getting credit for Blackboard per se, it was simply to get the product out the door with whatever it took. I paid for travel for several people in the Sakai community who could not otherwise attend meetings where I felt their presence was very valuable and their organizations could not afford their attendance. Again, the funds were given without any requirement of public announcement that the funds came from Blackboard. These funds were a gift/grant because I wanted the particular person to be at the meeting – it was not to make it about Blackboard. I travelled to the Sakai meetings in Atlanta, Paris, and Puebla Mexico as well as had Blackboard pay my way to the Sakai Foundation board meetings while I was still on the board. I also went to a Moodle Moot in Los Angeles. I gave talks at each of these meetings – mostly focused on bringing some excitement back to the CLE and making sure that everyone knew how awesome Sakai 2.9 was. Blackboard paid my part-time salary and made it possible for me to spend nearly all my own spare time working on Sakai. Beyond bug fixes and release support for Sakai 2.9, the my primary large developments were to completely replace the Sakai Web Content tool with a JSR-168 portlet that eliminated the double iframe problem and allowed us to deal with sites that are starting to set the X-Frame header. The second development was a major investment in cleaning up the LTI code in Sakai and release a new version of LTI with Sakai 2.9.2 that fixed over 45 problems that were identified in the LTI code from the 2.9.0 release. Both the new Web Content tool and LTI code should be in the upcoming 2.9.2 release. This was all supported by Blackboard. University of Michigan (Beth, Zhen, and John) can also take a bunch of the credit for the new LTI code as well. Matt Jones and Sam Ottenhoff of LongSight also helped with the Web Content tool. I even spent Blackboard funds to send myself to a purely academic conference. I figure I am an academic researcher – I should go to an academic (i.e. not industry) conference once in a while. It was my first non-industry conference in years. I installed a Sakai 2.9 QA server on my Blackboard-provided server hardware. I wanted this so I could do more complete tests of Sakai’s increasing support for LTI-related web services. So What Did You Do For Blackboard Last Year? I did do a few things for Blackboard that weren’t just working on Sakai. I advocated internally for quick implementation of LTI 1.1 in ANGEL – which was completed in mid-summer and announced at BbWorld 2012 in July. I joyfully filled out my IMS Ring of Compliance with the ANGEL logo and got the tattoo in New Orleans with Linda Feng doing the filming. I did a review of the xpLor integration API and made suggestions that led to a new version of the API that makes it more reasonable to integrate xpLor into an LMS at “arms length” – it made xpLor more like just anther external tool in terms of its access to information within the LMS. I hope this new API will be the basis for a general-purpose Learning Object Repository Integration (LORI) API in an upcoming version of IMS LTI 2.x and that such an API will allow many tools (i.e. not just xpLor) to enjoy deep integration with LMS systems. I built the API code to support the revised LORI API so that Blackboard’s xpLor (as well as other LOR products) can smoothly integrate into Sakai’s Lessons capability as of Sakai 2.9.2. I also built PHP sample code/unit tests for that API. I have been interacting with the Blackboard Engage (formerly Edline) group that sells a very successful K12 CMS system. I am working with them as they explore LTI integrations. (I am not announcing any delivery of any product here) I have been attending IMS quarterly meetings and Learning Impact to continue to move IMS LTI 2.0 and other IMS activities forward. I have been working with Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Wimba/Elluminate) as they explore the LTI integration. They are in pretty good shape on their own but I help a little bit here and there when they ask. I worked with my new colleagues from Moodlerooms. But really I mostly just learned from them. We went through the design of the Moodle 2.3 LTI code and its design approaches – and I stole many of those ideas for LTI in Sakai. They showed me some of their secrets of how they get Moodle to scale so well. Their approaches really informed what I think we should do in Sakai if we want to become a SaaS application. Seeing the Moodlerooms SaaS implementation makes me just a little jealous. There were several things I did not do in the past year. First, I am not allowed to work on closed-source products directly as part of the employment contract between University of Michigan, Blackboard, and me. So I have not written any code for Learn, xpLor, or any of Blackboard’s non-open source products. This has not been a problem – I have been plenty busy with Sakai and IMS things and Blackboard has plenty of really talented folks working on those products. The second thing I have not done is any kind of sales support. Three times in the past year a sales person in a situation where Sakai was involved in a possible Learn sale has contacted me asking for help. In each case I have politely declined. My management (in the Blackboard engineering organization) has put absolutely no pressure on me at all to do any sales support at all. I doubt they even knew I was contacted. I have answered a few technical questions about different versions of Sakai or how to convert data but nothing on the strategies or tactics of a particular sale. So I feel very comfortable and feel no conflict of interest. If Blackboard products fare well in the marketplace I am happy because my budget for money to spend on Sakai goes up. But I have had no problem at all remaining 100% loyal to Sakai and the Sakai community over the past year as a Blackboard employee – in particular because my management expects me to be committed to Sakai and the Sakai community. So What Went Wrong? Nothing is perfect, right? There must be some disappointment. If I look back over the year, the only thing that leaves me a little disappointed is that I really wanted to get to the point that I could use Blackboard’s performance testing lab and quality assurance processes and apply them to Sakai as a way to increase overall resources available to the community. This would be an amazing contribution if I can pull it off. I made some progress on this last summer when the performance test lab in Blackboard (which is awesome) did some performance testing on Sakai and identified some areas that could be improved. I really would love to have gotten that work finished and presented to the Sakai community – but I just got too distracted by other things to stay on top of that task and bring it home. And once Sakai 2.9.0 shipped it seemed to me to be less pressing. Perhaps in time I will come back to this task and finish it. But even now, it is kind of on my back burner. Not much else went wrong. So What Is Next? In general, much of the roadmap of the Sakai CLE is discussed and set at the annual meeting – this year in San Diego. So some of these priorities might get adjusted after that meeting. But for now, these are the two tasks I will set out to accomplish this summer as my Blackboard contribution to Sakai: I want Sakai to be the first LMS to ship LTI 2.0 support. While LTI 1.1 is great and nearly universal, it is starting to fray at the edges as each LMS pours more and more extensions into it. These extensions take widely different approaches, use different formats and web service interaction patterns. There is no interoperability and no conformance tests for these extensions. LTI 2.0 gives a way to solve all these problems – but we have to get started before there is any payoff. So I plan to write the Sakai LTI 2.0 support, a full set of PHP sample code to compliment the Rails sample code developed by John Tibbets and contributed to IMS, and work to get LTI 2.0 into Moodle through my MoodleRooms colleagues. I will also start building sample LTI 2.0 tools and write LTI 2.0 documentation to help evangelize LTI 2.0 to other LMS systems. This is a long task – but the best time to get started is now. Once I have LTI 2.0 underway I want to circle back and look at IMS Common Cartridge import and export in Sakai. Chuck Hedrick has done a great job with Lessons in terms of CC import and export – but I want to expand it to interact with everything in Sakai – not just content in Lessons. I want to look at interoperability of the cartridges in a way that supports open educational resource use cases. I will be teaching a Python MOOC on Blackboard’s CourseSites platform. I want to use this as a way to learn how to teach using Bb Learn and explore some of the cool features of Learn as well as spread my Python material to a few thousand more students through yet another channel. I also expect to serve as an early heavy user of LTI in CourseSites to make sure that it is easy for others who come in after me. I want to also play with the nice Common Cartridge and Open Educational Resource support in Learn as well – again to serve as an pattern for others to follow building MOOC / OER courses. Here is the link to enroll in my course (scroll down to Python for Informatics). I would like to increase Blackboard’s direct support of the Apereo Foundation. We spent three+ years merging Sakai and JASig – for me it is time to invest in Apereo so it can move into the kinds of wonderful new areas we had imagined as we designed the merger. Summary/Reflection It has been a heck of a year. Releasing Sakai 2.9.0 and (soon) Sakai 2.9.2 will be really important milestones for me. My own measurement of the value of my Blackboard activities is simply that the Sakai community is thriving and healthy and the product continues to move forward and improve. Back a year ago I told people that this would all be “no big deal” and everything would be fine. I hope that people now see a year later that this is indeed the case. Blackboard has gently supported the Sakai community in appropriate ways and without fanfare. As was stated March of last year, Blackboard intends to have a healthy engagement in open source activities like Moodle and Sakai and do so in a way that advances the causes of those communities in order to have a healthy open source ecosystem in higher education. When I look at both my involvement in Sakai and the Moodlerooms team’s involvement in Moodle – I am pretty pleased and proud of what has been done so far. As always, comments welcome.

Knewton CEO Jose Ferriera has an interesting and revealing blog post up about “the coming adaptive world.” In part, it is a response to a report on adaptive learning by Education Growth Advisors. Jose writes, “Despite our constant protestations to the contrary, observers often confuse Knewton with the many adaptive learning app makers who are now popping up. Or they confuse app makers with platforms. Or they think we’re all competitors.” It’s a bit of a red herring, since the report does distinguish between platform and publisher business models. That said, the meaning of the distinction between these two categories isn’t drawn terribly clearly, and it’s fair for Knewton to try to clarify its market positioning. But in doing so, Jose reveals what appears to be a shift in their thinking about the market for a platform like theirs which tells us something important about the ed tech market in general. Knewton has always been a platform play. They don’t design educational products. They provide an analytics engine that can be used to make educational products. So they are business-to-business. They sell to other education companies. The value proposition they offer is that they have invested in data science talent and infrastructure that is more powerful and sophisticated than most education companies can manage. It’s a bit like Amazon saying, “Hey, you’re never going to have even a tiny fraction of the experience that we have running unbelievably massive systems that can never go down. Why don’t you just leave that part of things to us by using Amazon Web Services and focus your attention on building the parts of your product that are specific to you?” This is a reasonable pitch for a company like Knewton to make, in my view. The issue that I have had with the company’s public marketing is that there has been a little too much “WHEEEEEEE!” in it: Click here to view the embedded video. I think there is a certain ethical responsibility to demystify these technologies in order to help educators and students alike understand when and how they can be helpful. I also think that demystification makes good business sense from Knewton’s perspective. The company simply isn’t going to get good results (and therefore repeat engagements) by hooking up random customer content to their analytics engine. They need content that has been designed for analytics in some real sense in order to produce meaningful insights. They need customers to come to them having some idea of what capabilities they want to design into the product from the beginning. And that’s where Jose’s post gets interesting. He writes, Sure — it’s straightforward enough to wire up a simple, self-contained adaptive app, based on a pre-determined, limited decision-tree. But how much better would that app be if it contained an effectively unlimited amount of back-end content? If all of its assessment items had been algorithmically “normed” so that they resulted in exact concept proficiency data for each student? Or if the app pre-acted to the learning modalities of each student? Or if it “started hot” so that from Day 1 of a student taking a new course, all her prior concept proficiencies and learning styles had been preloaded? Knewton makes possible all these things and more. Today, Knewton functionality includes pinpoint student proficiency measurement, content efficacy measurement (yes, we can tell you how effective your content is), student engagement optimization, atomic-concept adaptive learning, and concept-level analytics. Next year we’re adding “adaptive tutoring,” which combines the wisdom of crowds with Knewton’s network to find the perfect people online right now to give you real-time help. Hmm. Assessment items being “algorithmically ‘normed’ so that they resulted in exact concept proficiency data for each student?” “Pinpoint student proficiency measurement?” Gee, that sounds suspiciously like Item Response Theory. And if you can find your way past Knewton’s marketing to their tech blog, you will find out that, in fact, Item Response Theory is exactly what Knewton uses for this. Still missing is a straightforward explanation of what ITR can and cannot do well as well as the kind of content design investment that Knewton’s customers would have to make to take advantage of this capability. It’s not as simple as sprinkling a little machine learning fairy dust on your content. Customers that come to Knewton without that understanding of the investment they will need to make are going to end up spending a lot more time and money than they anticipated. But the larger point is that framing specific capabilities that Knewton customers can think about in advance is a start toward positioning themselves as a real infrastructure platform company. Likewise, “adaptive tutoring,” which appears to be a whizzy name for expertise recommendation, is a specific function that app designers can think about when they are building out new services, whether it is math tutoring or college counseling or career counseling. This positioning begins to enable app developers to think about what they can do with learning analytics services. Jose writes, “Until recently, only large learning companies and university systems could use the Knewton platform. But now our enterprise API is flexible enough for a much wider audience. We’re happy to partner with anybody — even so-called ‘competitors.’ We can’t quite say “yes” to everyone who wants to work with us yet, but our capacity is growing by leaps and bounds every day.” And there is the pivot. Up until now, Knewton has been focusing on the big publishers—particularly Pearson, with whom it has a big partnership deal. One reason for that certainly could be that their APIs were not ready for smaller players before now. But I suspect another driver is the huge growth in ed tech startups in general and companies claiming to have some sort of adaptive learning products in particular. Arguably, a market exists today where one didn’t exist a couple of years ago. I say “arguably” because it remains to be seen whether this onslaught of small companies is just the result of an investment bubble or a sustainable trend. Most of these companies are never destined for IPO, and it’s not clear what the long-term appetite is for acquisition in this sort of volume or, lacking that appetite, how many of these companies are geared up to be small but self-sustaining businesses for the rest of their natural lives. (The fact that so many of them are looking for venture money is not a good sign.) In any event, an analytics infrastructure like Knewton absolutely could make many of these small companies potentially interesting and sustainable on significantly less startup cash by providing them with infrastructure, in the same way that AWS makes it easier and cheaper for all sorts of internet startups to form. But in order to become that sort of trusted backbone, they have to stop talking like magicians and start talking like infrastructure partners. The post Knewton (Quietly) Pivots appeared first on e-Literate.

I am totally geeked and somewhat histrionic that CC took a look at my plight. Elliot Harmon of CC commented on my post about CC-∞ (Infinity) from yesterday. … Thinking about CC Infinity, I worry that it would create an infinite number (sorry) of incompatible bodies of work. The exciting promise of OER is the ability to seamlessly mix content together from different sources. Navigating a complicated set of restrictions would make life much more difficult for educators and content creators…. Since my response is really long I decided to make it whole post. Elliott, Thanks for your comment. I feel good that the topic is receiving some discussion at CCHQ. When I say “content slums” – I mean any cloning of material for the sole purpose of making money off ads, getting into search results or taking away views. YouTube is not a content slum – but a YouTube channel with nothing but cloned content is a slum (in my vernacular). But my definition hardly matters. The problem in a sense is the kind of thing that happens when something like CC-BY is very successful – I used it on everything. But at some point my fragmentary bits come together in something like a whole book or whole course and after years of development and promotion my work starts to get some attention. But that very moment that I get attention for my work is the exact moment when bottom-feeders can gain the most advantage by cloning those materials. There comes a time where one needs something that is more precise than the CC-BY series. One might say “use NC” and that will keep people from cloning content on YouTube with ads. But if they are caught – they turn off ads for a few days and then when no one is looking they turn them back on. If all they are doing is cloning materials, they are complying with ND. And they are not trying to limit others from spamming – so they are complying with SA. So all the CC additions are pretty much useless in the face of those whose intention is to clone (and not remix or add value to) materials. The answer is ARR with pre-granted permissions. In order to avoid the “incompatibility” you speak of above, I would word all the permissions in the following form: If you are printing a limited number of copies of this book for use in a course, then you are granted CC-BY license to these materials for that purpose. If you translate this book into a language other than English, then you are granted a CC-BY license to these materials with respect to the publication of your translation. In particular you are permitted to sell the resulting translated book commercially. If you are hosting these materials on a server not connected directly to the Internet (i.e. behind a firewall) to better serve a local population, then you are granted a CC-BY license to these materials for that purpose. If you are creating a derived work that includes more than 50% and less than 90% of this content then you are granted a CC-BY-SA-NC license to these materials for that purpose. If you are creating a derived work that includes more than 5% and less than 50% of this content then you are granted a CC-BY license to these materials for that purpose. If you are creating a derived work that includes less than 5% this content then you are granted a CC0 license to these materials for that purpose. By limiting the statements to when a non-ARR license can be used but insisting that those licenses be from the existing CC set hopefully means that the only complex legal interpretation will be the “when to apply” parts of the statements and not the “what happens” part of the statements. Of course I am not a lawyer… :) You can sit in a room at CCHQ and convince yourselves that such a thing would somehow confuse the CC brand. It indeed might. And so CC might decide not to do it. But just because CC does not build such a thing, it does not mean that thing thing is not needed and it does not keep someone else (i.e. like me) from building such a thing. I have decided that CC-Infinity is a bad moniker for the idea. Yesterday I was in a hurry and trying to figure what the “opposite” of CC0 was. My new “opposite of CC0″ is CC1 – CC-One. With the addition of CC-One, there is a delightful slider bar of options on a number line. CC0 would be at 0.0, CC-BY would be at 0.25, CC-BY-SA would be at 0.5, and CC-SA-NC would be 0.75, CC-BY-SA-ND-NC would be 0.85, and CC1 would be at 1.0. It is beautiful – CC1 completes the set perfectly. CC0 starts from PD and works up while CC1 starts from ARR and works down while CC-BY populates useful stopping points in the middle. I love the symmetry – as an engineer it feels like it is now complete. I also understand if CC thinks that if you make CC1 it will be come too popular and folks will abandon CC-BY, preferring CC1 even for little things like a Flickr photo. This might reduce the overall amount of CC-BY. I would disagree, I think that CC1 would mean more people would find one of the CC licenses suitable for far more materials. Some might start with CC1 to dip their toes into CC and then after becoming more educated and comfortable know when they want to use the CC-BY series. I think that CC1 might lead to a short term drop in the use of CC-BY and friends – but in the long run – by making the CC language more expressive and widening the range, we can involve far more content creators in CC overall. Every crack we can put in ARR is a step in the right direction. And frankly something like CC1 might give mainstream publishers and content producers a way to loosen their grip ever so slightly in a way that more slowly achieves our common goals – but does so for a far wider range of materials. Comments welcome. P.S. You really need to look at the Bill Fitzgerald post on Creative Commons and Human Nature where he talks about the recent improvement in the Createspace policy that addresses the rights of the copyright holder when the copyright license is “non-exclusive”. It is a beautiful thing – the policy was changed from “first in wins” to “copyright holder wins” early last year. If CC had something to do with this – outstanding. If not, you should say nice things about it and try to get other distribution channels to adopt similar policies. I had a very unhappy run-in with Createspace back in 2010 that caused me a lot of pointless work – back when the policy was “first in wins” and the material was CC-BY-SA. P.P.S. If I do build this “something less than ARR” framework, I won’t call it CC1 because then I would be sued (rightfully) for trademark infringement. I would love to call it “ARRGH” but I don’t yet know what the “G” and “H” stand for to make the acronym work. :)