eLearning Roadtrip

When I Think of Student Success

The tendency to link software with student success has accelerated since 2012, as the educational technology sub-sector known as "integrated planning and advising for student success" has gained prominence through a series of grants funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to colleges and the tech partners they have selected to help the colleges improve student performance. These days, more than 100 companies offer integrated planning and advising technology platforms and tools for student success includes that serve a wide variety of functions, from deciding where to go to college, to facilities and course scheduling, from helping students select select majors to staying on track with program completion. Student success is a huge part of the current ed tech market scene. (Disclosure: In my current day job, I work for a company with a large part of its business dedicated to Student Success.)

EDUCAUSE has led efforts to help institutions explore both the promise and the risks of Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS). Per their website:  "iPASS is an integrative approach to student success that promotes shared ownership for educational progress among students, faculty, and staff. It encompasses services that help students formulate and advance toward educational goals, including advising, counseling, progress tracking, and academic early alerts. iPASS technologies can contribute by documenting and tracking students’ educational plans, improving data analysis, offering self-service resources that reduce advisor workloads, and triggering interventions based on student behavior or faculty input."

There have been two Gates Foundation-funded rounds of grant-making by EDUCAUSE in support of student success. The first was the Integrated Planning and Advising System project, designed to get schools and their tech partners to collaborate on getting platforms and practices to work together better. I was involved in the first IPAS round when the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework was contracted by the Gates Foundation to evaluate the 19 "student success + software initiatives" that were funded in that first go-round. We visited the 19 IPAS campuses that were working with specific tech company partners to further the implementation of a tech platform that could help campuses with student planing and advising platforms. PAR had used the PAR Student Success Matrix we had developed to help our own PAR members make the connection between predictions of  student risk with selection of interventions. We were able to determine and demonstrate measured effectiveness with particular groups of students under particular circumstances - sort of like getting the most effective prescription for dealing with a particular medical condition. We had been excited about our own results; the fact that we were going to be able to evaluate student success impact with our matrix of time-in-program and actionable predictors with a broader set of institutions was thrilling.

By the time the second round of grants were funded, the name of the initiative had become "integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success: iPASS". The connection between tech and advising (e.g. watchlists, early alerts), tech and planning (e.g. curriculum pathway planners, strategic scheduling), program fit and course navigation (e.g. obstacle course GPS), integrating predictive analytics with real-time student activity stream data.) As it happens, the iPASS initiative helped spark PAR Framework's acquisition by Hobsons in January, 2016, when two state systems of education proposed integrating PAR's predictives and intervention measurement with Starfish's real time student activity data stream used to build student watchlist/advisement capabilities as part of their iPASS grant proposal.

5 years, two major initiatives and several rounds of small planning and implementation grants later, EDUCAUSE has produced a library of student success resources for educational practitioners, on everything from "Things you should know about IPAS" (yes, that acronym is different than in the previous paragraph; more on that in a bit) to implementation handbooks, data tables and evaluation reports. and  from https://library.educause.edu/resources/2013/8/integrated-planning-and-advising-services-ipas-research.

It has been great to be a participant in this wave of innovation in education, where data is being used as currency for more effective decision-making in schools and colleges. No doubt, when we look back on how decisions were made in 10 years from now, we are going to wonder how we managed to live without platforms that help visualize patterns, red-flag student risks before they become problems, provide a 3D map of an academic transcript that can cross-walk among formal and informal learning experiences. 

Even so, I need to say something.

When I think of student success I never, ever think of software first. 

Software can make things easier to do, of course. It offers far better ways to keep track of searchable information requiring any manipulation. I'd rather build formulae in a spreadsheet, and have huge collections of data fueling explorations that report results in approachable visual reports and dashboards. Learning management and content management and curricular tracking, assessments and performance support are all more available, more accessible and more targeted at specific points in the educational experience than ever before.

Just as data associated with online and digital transactions help inform marketeers of our retail intentions even before we know for certain, ourselves, patterns of students behaviors can raise red flags before students are even aware that they may be drifting into dangerous territory for "students like them".

Technological inventions, applied to performance and learning problems, can help solve those problems. In doing so, the inventions become innovations, human ingenuity applied to solve performance problems in novel and compelling ways.

Innovative educational entrepreneurs  - "edu-preneurs', if you will - see an opportunity for tech in schools and are compelled to create products that promise to disrupt education as we know it. They point to deep data science and predictive analytics as if these analysis techniques are beyond the norm.

It's seems important to remind ourselves that in education, the most most important innovator in this value chain are not necessarily the ed tech entrepreneurs. Rather, the ones on the front lines of teaching and learning, supporting student achievement putting new tech tools to the test in the service of student success are todays true innovators. 

It's important to have shared articulated expectations of "the norm", so that one can identify those not yet achieving at that level, and how one inspire those working "above average" to continue to improve. Common expectations of meaning and outcomes are essential elements of student success that gives all students a shot at achieving their dreams. We need to include ALL students in our considerations of success, not just those attending college for the first time, going to school full time, or living on campus. We need to keep the student at the center.

With thanks to Kalah Burks and Rebecca Wheeler, University of South Alabama, for the great conversation that shook this post out of my head.

Driving the #LearnerAnalytics Bus

The message emerging from this week's University of Maryland University College (UMUC) Learner Analytics Summit (#innovatelearning) was explicit and to the point: Forward thinking instititutions are stepping up to opportunities for improving post-secondary experiences for students using data to inform proactive, evidence-based decision-making. 

No doubt, we all hope that the answers to questions we can't sometimes even articulate yet are going to emerge from dashboards and apps, fully formed, as if from the Magic 8-Ball. Sadly this is not the way things work. We need to build capacity for decision-making in a data-informed world just as much as we need to figure out the exo-structure required for systems to interoperate and for intelligence to be shared.

Matt Pistilli (Purdue University) tweeted one of the great tweets of the event when he noted that "the data do not speak for themselves. I have, in fact, been in the room with them, and they did not speak a word #innovatelearning".  It's a great reminder that if we are going to get anywhere quickly on this journey, we are going to need to be the ones driving the bus on learner anaytics adoption and creating organizational cultures of evidence-based decision-making.

Malcolm Gladwell has talked about tipping points, those moments when a new practice or innovation, idea or trend emerges into public consciousness. Learner analytics are at the point of tipping into public consiciousness in the war on student loss.  

Congratulations to Karen Vignare and her team for convening us, to Bill Moses and the Kresge Foundation for the means to do so, a high-five to Linda Baer for her guiding hand, and thanks to all the presenters and participants for helping us start figuring out how to drive the learner analytics bus, on the journey toward Evidence-Based Decision Land. (Cue unicorns, bluebirds and rainbows.)

Shameless Plug for and Heartfelt Thanks to WCET

As I have been immersing myself in the issues, politics and nuances of post-secondary educational online learning this past year, I have come to appreciate the role that a cooperative community of interest can play. Can I just say, It's quite nice having a posse that I can count on to watch my back, to help keep programs on point, and to keep an eye on the horizon so I'm not taken by surprise by some hot unexpected blip on the innovation screen.

So I want to take a moment to give the crew from WCET a shout out, and to thank them for (1) contributing to institutional quality through their focus on implementation (2) focusing on excellent execution of services that online students AND faculty need to succeed; and (3) sharing their knowledge, experience and wisdom with the other members of the Cooperative.

I'm not just talking about the WCET staff, but of course we wouldn't even be having this conversation if it weren't for the rock star staff.

I am also talking about my Executive Council - leaders actively engaged in the work of enabling excellence in post-secondary education in their executive roles in universities and companies.

I am talking about my Steering Committee - dedicated individuals who run for office to represent the interests of their fellow Cooperative members.

I am talking about our Common Interest Group members, busy  people who actively share successes and places for improvement, documenting the collective knowledge in resources available to all individuals who work at our member institutions and companies.

I am talking about our Annual Meeting Program Committee, who have put together a great agenda for our face-to-face time together in LaJolla, CA, November 10-13.

I am talking about all those people who take the time to send me notes, feedback, suggestions, advice.

If you are from a company or institution that cares deeply about making a difference in how learning and learners can be better served by learning technologies, we may be just the ticket. Check us out at wcet.wiche edu. Come join us at our annual meeting. Come register for a webcast.

We're heeee-r-e.

Thinking about mobile learning? Ask yourself these questions

I recently had the opportunity to write a short article for ELearning! Magazine on the topic "When Mobility Meets Learning". It gave me an opportunity to share a series of questions that I have been asking my clients over the years whenever they have started thinking about whether or not a technology learning project makes sense for their organization. 

With laptops, notebooks, netbooks,  tablets, feature phones, smart phones, iPods, iPhones and iPads at the ready, the question may not be if one is going to look for opportunities to try a mobile learning initiative, but when it is going to be time to “go mobile”. When thinking about adding mobile services to your enterprise’s learning technology portfolio, it is useful to give some serious thought to WHY a mobile learning initiative makes sense. Without establishing a baseline for assessing and evaluating costs relative to outcomes the likelihood of being able to demonstrate value and impact will be compromised.

With this in mind...

Why a mobile learning project? What is it that a mobile learning project will allow you to do that you could not do before?

What do you really want to do? Is the fascination with the attraction of offering learning stakeholders something new and different? Are there people in the field who won’t have the resources they need without a mobile learning solution? Are you simply curious, and just want to see what happens?

How you know when you have met your goal? How will you know if your mobile initiative made a difference?

What unique result do you want your mobile learning effort to achieve?

What technologies do you need to get started? What devices will you support? What network will you use? What carrier will you choose? Will you establish strict selection policies, or will you try to integrate everyone’s devices regardless of operating system?

For whom is your mobile initiative intended? Will it be for everyone, or will you focus more on the needs of traveling staff, or will it be aimed more at remote, distributed and field based personnel?

What will your stakeholders need to be successful? Will they know what is expected? Will they need training or orientation sessions to understand what they need to do?

How are you going to fund it? How are you going to sustain it, and for how long?

How will you evaluate your effectiveness? What will you tell your sponsoring executives when you go back for next year’s budget request and they ask you to justify your program?

Although mobile learning certainly brings its own unique challenges, the good news is that many of the antecedents of mobile learning have prepared learning technology stakeholders for the journey ahead.  In reflecting upon Christiansen’s notion of disruptive innovations, Penny Wilson has described mobile wireless devices—such as cell phones, handhelds, and notebook computers—as “tools of mass disruption” that are going to help spark a period of innovation for learning technology stakeholders of all kinds. While these devices may not yet be completely ubiquitous, reliable or rich, it is already clear that mobility is changing life as we know it. Our challenge as learning professionals is to make mobile learning so compelling that stakeholders continue to see possibilities, not problems.

 

ASTD TechKnowledge 2010 (#TK10) Trip Report

This blogpost is my long overdue trip report for the ASTD TechKnowledge conference Las Vegas, NV January 26-29, 2010.  For the first time in a number of years I attended TK10 as a stakeholder and participant, rather than as a vendor or industry observer. I was a member of this year's TK10 program committee, one of the people who volunteered to wrangle a small piece of the program dealing with Authoring and Platforms.

How did THAT ever happen??

Well....You may remember that there was a point last spring, around the time of the ASTD International Conference and Exhibition, that the learning blogo/twitter-sphere was sparkling with breezy gossip about how badly new media was being used at ICE. Well, I love gossip as much as the next person, so of course I scrolled and scanned and searched to get my fill. Tsk, tsk, meow.

Even so, at the time I remember thinking just how precious we elearning gods and goddesses can sound when we rail about the flawed life forms around us who aren't as good at this stuff as we are. And in that weak moment I made a resolution to be part of the solution, if I had a chance to do something proactive to help training and development techie newbies. 

As sure as the sun rises in the east, Jim Javenkowski got in touch with me right around that same time with an invitation to join the program committee. I knew it was fate. And so I said yes.

ASTD puts a lot of effort into creating a strong program for its attendees. It starts with an experienced conference coordinator. Uses session evaluation data. Presentation proposals from members are submitted to peer review by program committee members with expertise across each and every part of the "learning and development meets eLearning" ecosystem. I personally was involved in proposal reviews, days of discussion about proposals and presentations, providing orientation webinars and sitting in a number of concurrent sessions. Committee members tweeted during the conference, and offered brief summaries of our closing session "TweetFest" experience during the closing session.

Yes. You heard me right. We closed this year's ASTD conference with a TweetFest. (And yes. We had wireless. Everywhere.)

I was very sad that @marciamarcia (Marcia Conner) was not able to be in attendance at the opening session. I so appreciate her social media sensibilities, and was looking forward to hearing about her and Tony Bingham's upcoming book. But of course family emergencies trump just about everything. Glad that things have resolved well.

Michelle Lentz, also known as @writetechnology, was one of my fabulous fellow program committee members. She inspired us all into getting a relatively good #tk10 Twitter back channel going on!! There were a number of prolific tweeters, thanks to those who shared. I especially want to recognize @carmean (Colleen Carmean), @stevier (Stevie Rocco), @technostats (Phil Ice,) @WWWayne (Wayne Hodgins), @arossett (Allison Rossett) and @eugenelee (Eugene Lee) for being among my favorite tweeters. I also met a number of new favorites to follow at Colleen Carmean's excellent Tech Intensive. You know who u are :-) Thanks for giving Twitter a shot.

I loved getting time with @WWWayne, also known as Wayne Hodgins.  I love his work on the Snowflake Effect. These days, he is usually found on the good ship Learnativity, somewhere in the South Pacific. That I had occasion to hang with him three days in a row, in person, was exceptionally great.

During the past several years, I have taken the eLearning Roadtrip to a lot of conferences and events. I have really come to appreciate that different parts of the learning and technology ecosystem really do need unique solutions for developing competencies needed for workplace success. #TK10 helps the learning and development communities stretch toward being more effective users and managers of teaching and training using technologies.

ASTD TechKnowledge may not turn you into an elearning expert....but hey, isn't that what the eLearning Guild is for? TechKnowledge will help you engage more meaningfully with eLearning experts that you will depend on to execute on your learning technology goals. For so many people beginning the journey into the world of technology-mediated learning and  performance support, and with eLearning becoming a part of the mainstream, #TK10 is a worthy place to begin the immersion.

Just wait until you see what we are cooking up for next year. And yes, I AM on the program committee.

Culture Gaps, according to Carl Berger

Let me begin by saying that I am a member of the  Carl Berger fan club. Carl's work has been an inspiration since I found myself being drawn into the world of learning objects back in the mid 90s. His involvement with the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, NLII (now ELI), IMS and Sakai has given all of us a foundation for implementing enterprise learning technologies in higher education...one of my favorite examples of sustaining learning technology innovation on the road to broad adoption.

I heard Carl speak at the April 2005 University of Missouri Apple Digital Campus Leadership conference. I'm not even sure what the topic of his speech was anymore. I just remember that there was a point where he compared and contrasted the things that academic institutions and corporate enterprises care about. I knew he was talking directly to me. Carl articulated some of the big value differences I had encountered in my job (at the time I was the Sr. director of global higher ed solutions for Macromedia.)  I scribbled a bunch of notes from his slides - and eventually used his remarks as the basis for some work I was doing at the time. It proved to be a very effective way of explaining some of the differences in how our customers viewed the world to my corporate co-workers, both at Macromedia and later at Adobe Systems.

I have since added a few things to this graphic, and no longer can remember which of this comes from Carl, and what comes from me riffing off Carl's ideas. As he helped catalyze these insights, I am happy to give him all the credit. (If you click on the slide graphic it will launch as a full screen image, so don't even try to squint and read the text.)

Given the past few posts, it seemed like a good way to illustrate a few of the big differences in what is valued in different parts of the elearning value chain. As you can see from the very first comparison on the list, innovation - that is, going forth where nobody has gone before - is highly valued in academic settings. From a perspective of the vendor community, volume is more important than innovation. It is far more important for more people to buy than for fewer people to buy, under any and all circumstances. It also shows the differing interests for using data - from the vendor perspective data supports decision-making, whereas for academics it is more for demonstrating the tenability of a construct.

During that same Apple Digital Campus meeting, then University of Missouri System President Elson Floyd warned us that "culture eats strategy, every time". It's time to figure out how to bridge a few of these culture gaps to see about maximizing the probabilities of our own success.

Innovation vs Implementation

The term innovation refers to a new way of doing something. It may mean incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between Invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation) . In other words, when an invention is applied to solve a problem or to do something completely differently than it has been done before, innovation occurs.

We are all attracted to what is new, different, possible - far more engaging than slogging through the familiar, mundane, routine.  Scholars are rewarded for being among the first wave of creative thinkers to explore new ideas. Businesses strive to be first to market. Of course, there is a huge difference between exploring new possibilities and defining new constructs, and figuring out how to take what is learned from these exploration to establish frameworks for improving practice. 

For so many of today's enterprises and institutions, the current opportunities for achieving excellence comes from not just in the creation of new knowledge but rather in figuring out the healthy balance between new knowledge that bring innovations to institutions and enterprises, and scalable, sustainable solutions that realize the benefits of new knowledge.  That means coming up with a framework that gives innovators enough time and opportunity to test the application of an innovation in a number of practice settings. It means giving implementers a long enough runway for applying the lessons learned from innovators at the point where empirical evidence indicates that the new ideas are likely to have the greatest impact.

Finding common ground between innovators and implementers can be a bit dodgy.  The diagram above, which is a Gartner Hype Cycle meets Everett Rogers'  Diffusion of Innovation mash-up,  shows two distinct kinds of participants in the innovation-to-adoption process. The curve shown on the left, above, shows innovator interest, taking us from the first moments of awareness to the peak of interest known in Gartner circles as the  Peak of Inflated Expectations . It is followed by a deep fall-off in interest, the so-called Trough of Disappointment once the new innovation starts to lose some of its glow, or not live up to expectations, or some combination of both. The Rogers Diffusion of Innovation curve, appearing on the right, is a standard distribution curve that depicts different stages of technology adoption, with the Early Adopters showing up just about the time that innovations start their move toward the Plateau of Productivity with Early and Late Majority adopters coming on board long after the innovations move through their distruptive stage.

Innovators simply can't imagine that people responsible for doing large-scale technology or training roll-outs, or running a profitable business, or managing a high performing team, don't want to try a bunch of new ideas without knowing exactly what the benefits of the changes will be. Immediately. Implementers can't figure out why it is so hard for innovators to stay focused on finding a path that ensures the smooth transition from the old way of doing things to the new. Implementating a innovation into practice requires deliberation, with evaluation based on evidence. The initial burst of interest over a new innovation may attract attention and gain early momentum.  Some innovations simply have have too much associated overhead, or may not be able to scale to scale, or may be too hard for mere mortals to use. 

What's clear is that for Adoption to hit the mainstream it take both - the innovators on the front lines, going forth where nobody has gone before, and the implementers in the back office and IT center, making sure that nobody gets left behind.