eLearning Roadtrip

AAAS and the March for Science

Today's post is a PSA for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I would like to share the letter I received this morning from Rush Holt, the chief executive officer of the AAAS, talking about the upcoming April 22 March for Science. If you like science, you might want to get involved.  Here it the letter: Now more than ever, we must demonstrate the importance of science to policymakers and the public. As you may know, there is a great deal of energy associated with the March for Science, which will take place in public spaces around the world on April 22, 2017. Activities will include marches and rallies, open houses, children's science festivals and teach-ins. AAAS has now signed a Memorandum of Understanding to partner with and support the March for Science, and we are developing a wide array of activities for before, during and following the March. We believe it is incumbent on AAAS to help ensure the March has a positive outcome. We want the March to remain a nonpartisan, educational, diverse, and ethical expression of the value of science to society, and we want to make sure the momentum doesn’t disappear after the March takes place. Over my entire career, I do not believe I have ever seen such a large, spontaneous outpouring of support for the idea of science. We think it is perhaps the best opportunity in many years to communicate a positive message to the public and public officials about the value, utility, beauty, and power of science, engineering, and technology. It is an important opportunity to advocate for the maintenance, and even the defense, of the conditions necessary for science to thrive. If you are interested in learning more, please visit www.marchforscience.com. However, we also need your help. Here are four things you can do right now: Visit our Force for Science website to stay up-to-date on the issues, understand the role that science plays in policy, follow AAAS advocacy activities, and find ways to engage and take action. Share your thoughts and ideas on our MemberCentral Trellis group. A team of AAAS staff meets every day to plan our advocacy activities, and we frequently take these discussions into account. Help make AAAS a stronger Force for Science by making a tax-deductible donation to our Flexible Action Fund. Tell others about AAAS, what we’re doing and why you’re a member of AAAS. You will be hearing more from us soon about new advocacy efforts and how you can get involved. Thank you for being a part of AAAS and for standing with us at this critical time for science. Sincerely, Rush D. Holt Chief Executive Officer, AAAS Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals

What an earthquake taught me about Twitter

We were rudely awakened this past Sunday morning when an earthquake threw us out of bed at 3:20 am. It was a big one. The roar of the quake, the smashing glasses, dishes, and pottery, accompanied by the sound of exploding transformers and the splash of hundreds of gallons of water being thrown out of the pool, was deafening.

And then the shaking ceased, the noise stopped, and it was all over.

Of course, we knew what had happened. We live in Northern California. People who live in "earthquake country" are prepared for earthquakes, or at least we like to think we are. Flashlights in every room, with shoes at bedside (to avoid bare feet meeting broken glass), 5 gallons of water and food/shelter for 72 hours. 

What we were NOT prepared for is the shock of sitting in the silence and the dark in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake that throws you out of bed at 3:20 in the morning.

The wifi and landline phone were dead; we had no power.  But I had a fully charged mobile phone and working cell service. I turned to Twitter and within about 15 seconds I learned that we had just experienced an 6.1-on-the-scale earthquake, the epicenter of which was just 9 miles to the southeast of where we live. I saw that friends in San Francisco and San Jose had been awakened by the quake, too, and had already checked in to see if we were okay. We saw that our friends in Napa had been slammed, and were advised not to drive over to help because the roads had been damaged. 

As the morning went on, we eventually posted pictures on Instagram and messages on Facebook to let friends and family know that we were alright. But what I learned in those first moments, when immediacy mattered most, was that in case of emergency, when WE needed targeted information, Twitter was where we turned first. 

 

 

 

 

Alan Greenberg: Blackboard Reboots

I admire and respect Wainhouse Research analyst Alan Greenberg, so was quite interested to read his recent post in which he reflects on changes that Blackboard introduced at this year's Blackboard World. I, too, was impressed with the "new Blackboard" while at Blackboard World this year, and am really looking forward to diving into some of the work we (the PAR team) will be doing with the Blackboard team.

Please refer to Alan's newletter for the complete article and especially for his take on why Blackboard's changes are a big deal.

Here are a few "nuggets" from his post to whet your appetite for more......

Blackboard Reboots @ Blackboard World
Alan D. Greenberg 

In an effort to give institutions and schools more value and greater exposure to its technology sets, Blackboard has completely revamped its product line, now integrating together its product portfolio with a totally new user experience (UX) and a declared focus on learners. All teaching and learning solutions will now include Blackboard’s “base” learning management system (Blackboard Learn) and provide a full-featured online environment with course delivery, synchronous collaboration tools, mobile apps, and integration with and access to content. Technology adoption services are also included.  

A tiered set of solutions are aimed at helping the educational user community address challenges such as retention, student engagement, learning analytics, communications and standards preparedness. There are four higher education teaching and learning solutions, four higher education campus commerce and security solutions, and five K-12 solutions that center on teaching and learning and community engagement. The company is considering adding more solution sets for international markets.

Blackboard also plans to launch a new version of its learning environment that is delivered via the public cloud. Now the company is providing customers a full set of options: self-hosted, hosted in Blackboard’s private cloud, or via the public cloud. Word is this public cloud offering will be fully available sometime this month or in September. Being piloted in the public cloud is Blackboard’s Open Education powered by Blackboard, also announced at Blackboard World. This is a course platform that allows teachers and faculty to run public online courses and/or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

The company has created a customized learning and analytics offering available to the 259 higher education Internet2 members. The Internet2 NET+ offering will not only provide access to Blackboard’s solutions, but also will include robust analytic and learning outcomes tools, a cloud-based, cross-institutional content repository that supports most competitive LMS’s, and help desk and adoption services. Cornell University; the University of Nebraska — Lincoln; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of Texas at Arlington; and Virginia Commonwealth University had representatives who guided and shaped the Internet2 NET+ certified solution.

At the core of the offering, which is fully deployable now, is Blackboard’s Learning Insight solution, which is a full-featured online and mobile version of Blackboard Learn LMS and Blackboard Collaborate.

(Ellen's aside: yes, this means that Collaborate works in the browser. NO more Java downloads!)

FOR MORE, click here and scroll down for Alan's full article.

NEW NSF REPORT: New Technology-based Models for Postsecondary Learning

In January 2013 I  participated in a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation to help establish a 10 year vision to reconceptualize postsecondary learning. This past week our co-convenors, Chris Dede, Harvard University and Eric Grimson, MIT, released the 47 page report that captured the results of that meeting. Entitled New Technology-based Models for Postsecondary Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Research Agendas, this is a comprehensive overview of promises, opportunities and challenges that will keep all of we post-secondary learning stakeholders on our toes for the next decade.

You can download the working draft of this paper here.

The basic premises addressed include the following:

• Advances in technology and in knowledge about expertise, learning, and assessment have the potential to reshape the many forms of education and training past matriculation from high school.
• In the next decade, higher education, military and workplace training, and professional development must all transform to exploit the opportunities of a new era, leveraging emerging technology-based models that can make learning more efficient and possibly improve student support, all at lower cost for a broader range of learners. 
• Potential risks must be managed, including those arising from the disruption of established delivery economics in our current learning institutions, the variable quality of learning outcomes these new models offer today, and the technical and conceptual challenges of better understanding how to design, develop, and implement innovative capabilities in ways that reliably deliver on their promise.

Workshop participants developed a framework for understanding this sea change and sketched steps towards a research agenda for realizing its benefits while avoiding pitfalls.

Contributors to this report include Daniel E. Atkins, W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information, and Professor of Information and Computer Science, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Lori Breslow, Director, Teaching and Learning Laboratory, MIT. John Cherniavsky, Senior Advisor, Division of Research on Learning, NSF. J.D. Fletcher, Senior Research Staff Member, Institute for Defense Analyses. Diana Oblinger, President and CEO, EDUCAUSE. Roy Pea, David Jacks Professor of Education and Learning Sciences, Stanford University. James W. Pellegrino, Distinguished Professor and Co-Director, Learning Sciences Research Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago. Bror Saxberg, Chief Learning Officer, Kaplan, Inc. James H. Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement,U.S. Department of Education. Russell Shilling, CAPT, MSC, USN, Program Manager, DARPA. Greg Tobin, President, English, Math, and Student Success, Pearson Higher Education and yours truly, Ellen Wagner, Executive Director, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education Cooperative for Educational Technologies. Arthur Josephson, Harvard Graduate School of Education, was our researcher.

20 "eLearnings" From Two Months on the Road(trip)

Been a busy couple of months of elearning road-trips. From EDUCAUSE to Online EDUCA, from WCET to WICHE, from DevLearn to AECT (with a little bit of virtual Sloan-C tossed in for good measure). Literally thousands of plenaries, presentations, and poster sessions from which to choose, along with hundreds of vendor stands and trade show booths. Here are some of my big take-aways:

• Hooray and congratulations! This distance/online/elearning thing we do has tipped into mainstream consciousness. Let's give a cheer for the researchers, the teachers, the authors, the artists, the technologists, the producers, the analysts and the evaluators who have made this happen. We rock.
• We matter enough that governments want to regulate us. Congressmembers rail against us. No more flying under the radar.
• Analytics are hot, hot, hot. Learning analytics, content analytics, web analytics, engagement analytics, to name a few.
• Speaking of analytics...mathematically speaking, a learning outcome is pretty much the same as a point of sale. (Thank you, Phil Ice.)
• Second Life is dead, dead, dead. Sorry.
• Mobile is the future.  Smartphones and tablets and readers, oh, my.
• Game based learning has a long way to go before people take it seriously.
• High quality video conferencing is making a comeback.
• We may get inspired by big ideas, but we are moved to action by fear, uncertainty and dread.
• On the commercial front...Pearson intends to own our universe. Adobe has pretty much given up on us. Just about everybody wants to sell us an "analytics solution". Or a mobile app.
• People really need to quit thinking that "open" is the same as "free".
• It's a lot easier to pontificate about the importance of change than it is to do things differently.
• There is a lot of research out there. Some of it is useful. 
• Empirical evidence doesn't need to be quantitative...but it does need to be a little more robust than simply pointing to people who are doing the same things.
• Quality is rarely absolute. It's contextual and situational. It may make more sense to think about "effective practices" rather than "best practice".
• Practitioners who make big sweeping statements without doing any background work on what others may have already been doing, saying or thinking end up sounding just a little bit naive and foolish. C'mon, people...use The Google.
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog...but EVERYONE knows if you are not prepared.
• One can pack a lot of snark in 140 characters.
• Learning is as natural as breathing. Learning really isn't the problem. Enabling meaningful, intentional outcomes and creating experiences that engage and inspire without costing an arm and a leg and without killing our interest and enthusiam for learning is the problem. 
• Sometimes you just need to show up.

Are YOU the Chief Online Education Officer at your Institution?

If so, we'd like to ask you to invite you to participate in a survey research project.

For the third year, WCET is partnering with the Campus Computing Project to conduct the Managing Online Education survey.  The survey focuses on the instructional, operational, and technology infrastructure of online education programs of institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada.

My colleague, Russ Poulin, has written an eloquent post on the WCET Frontiers blog, encouraging your particitation in this survey. To save you the hassle of clicking all the way through, I have excerpted part of his message, below. Please click here for the full post.

YOUR INSTITUTION NEEDS TO RESPOND TO THE SURVEY.

 <Sorry for yelling at you>

To avoid confusion, we would like one response from each institution. Given that some institutions are centralized, some are decentralized, and some laugh at the notion of organization, it is often difficult to know who is the correct person to invite to take the survey. There is no common position of “chief elearning officer” like there is with a CIO.

How Do You Participate?

Review the 2011 Managing Online Education survey to see what questions are being asked. If you are not what passes for a “chief Elearning officer,” ask around at your institution to see if someone has received an invitation and is completing the survey.  If you need an invitation or have other questions about the survey, contact Casey Green at[email protected].  He will help you out and get you access to the survey.  Survey responses must be submitted through the online survey software and not by completing the .pdf linked earlier in this paragraph.

I’m looking forward to your participation, seeing the results, and sharing them with you!  NOTE:  THE SURVEY DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 16.

Thanks!!

Big Data Comes to US Higher Education

WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, today announced the successful federation of datasets from the six institutions participating in the PAR (Predictive Analytics Reporting) Framework proof of concept project, just four months after the project’s early June launch. The goal of the PAR Framework is to identify variables that influence student retention and progression and to determine the impact of various demographic data on factors influencing loss and momentum. The data will be used to explore patterns that emerge when the datasets from considerably different institutions are analyzed as a single, unified sample. 

The dataset includes over 640,000 anonymized student records and over 3 million course level records, focusing on 33 common variables. The institutions represent public/private, two-year/four-year, and publicly-funded and proprietary institutions. 

“We have been using analytics as a tool for improving student retention and progression for several years,” said Dr. Phil Ice, vice president, research & development, American Public University System, and principal investigator of the PAR Framework Project. “Unifying records from multiple schools has the potential to expose generalizable patterns that can provide guidance to institutions across the board, regardless of their internal level of analytics expertise.” Ice continued, “In higher education, no predictive analytics project has been able to use a multi-institutional sample of this size. As a researcher, having a sample size of this number changes everything.” 

The WCET member institutions engaged in the PAR Framework project include American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and the University of Phoenix. Each institution obtained IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. All data was anonymized and encrypted to ensure that no data are personally identifiable. 

“We had been warned that we could never find six schools willing to collaborate on something as sensitive as an institutional student and course level data federation project,” noted Ellen Wagner, WCET Executive Director. “It’s exciting to see how forward-thinking WCET member institutions are bringing the power of “big data” to post-secondary education in the US. The magnitude of the data set unprecedented and the diversity of the participating institutions will provide us granular insight into similarities and differences across higher education institutions in the for profit, public and community college segments.” 

A summary of first findings are scheduled for presentations at the 23rd Annual WCET Conference in Denver, Colorado October 27th (https://wcetconference.wiche.edu/).

Honoring Steve

I have been asking friends if they had been startled at the strength of the emotions he or she has experienced at the passing of Steve Jobs. To a person, each has said yes.

I've wondered if some of the deep emotions are triggered when hearing and re-hearing his various inspirational speeches. They force a bit of self-reflection. As in, well, asking myself if MY attempts to think differently are workin' for me. Am I doing what I love? Uh....well...of course. But...THAT got me feeling all philosophical. And the more I reflected, the more I got all twisted up in a big emotional pretzel.

Then it dawned on me. It didn't have to be as hard as I was making it.

When I thought about what I really love (besides my spouse, colleagues and projects, of course), it was easy.

Cheese. I love cheese.

Once I said it out loud, it was super obvious what I could do to resolve this sadness. I signed up for a cheesemaking class. Something I've wanted to do for a bazillion years, but never made time to do it. 

My real lesson? Well, it's really not about the cheese, obviously. It's about making time to do the things that you love, want to love, or want to love more.

I've started daydreaming about "iChevre", "iFeta" and  "iPaneer". All of a sudden I feel just a little bitty bit less sad.

 

 

WCET Receives Grant for Groundbreaking Higher Education Analytic Research

I am pleased to share the following good news.

WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, announced today that WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, has been awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund an initiative to unify student data from six U.S. institutions and demonstrate the effective use of predictive analytic methods for improving student outcomes. The goal is to identify variables that influence student retention and progression, and guide decision-making that improves postsecondary student completion in the U.S.

This grant for the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework will aggregate data representing more than 400,000 student records from across six WCET member institutions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and the University of Phoenix. Each participating institution has been exploring or implementing descriptive, inferential or predictive analytics projects on their own student data; the PAR Framework expands on this work through exploration of patterns that can be derived when the six institutional datasets are considered as a single, unified sample.

The principal investigator is Phil Ice, Ed.D., American Public University System (APUS). The project will incorporate many of the best practices and award-winning predictive analytical methods for which Phil has been recognized by the Sloan Consortium and for which project partner Dr. Vernon Smith, Rio Salado College, has won the prestigious WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) award. WCET has appointed Beth Davis, WCET, to serve as the project director.

The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) is a cooperative, membership-driven, non-profit provider of solutions and services that accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. More information about WCET’s institutional membership resources, services and common interest groups can be found on here.

Lines are being drawn...over learning technology standards and specs?

Interesting article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus about a growing shitstorm around learning technology standards.

Per Jeff Young, author of article in question: "The issue centers around a single line of the 53-page grant guidelines for the program, known officially as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program: “All online and technology-enabled courses developed under this [program] must be compliant with the latest version of SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).”

So what's the big whiff?

And then I read a little bit further and all became clear: Dr. Rob Abel, IMS Global CEO, is pitching an absolute hiss over this particular requirement. Why? Because his group supports a different standard.

There is a rich and storied pissing match history that has developed between Dr. Abel and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative of the US Department of Defense over the past several years, and I am very sorry to see that the stains are going to get all over this exciting new collaboration between the US Departments of ED and Labor. 

A bit of perspective -The federal government made a decision 11 years ago to develop SCORM as a specification to serve as a cost-saving criterion for RFP / vendor selection. ADL/DOD have been the keeper of SCORM on behalf of all the Feds. So it seems to me that the US Dept of Labor is well within their rights to adhere to their own government spec. Especially since the SCORM spec is built upon the standards coming from IMS Global, and other standards bodies, including AICC, IEEE-LTSC, and ARIADNE.

Hats off to Dr. Abel, he has done a great job persuading .edu that the IMS Global is the only standard that really matters. I mean that sincerely. IMS's Common Cartridge helps institutions get better value from LMS vendors and publishers. Even the most technically skilled educators don't want to worry about learning technology standards. The tap dances required to get things to interoperate in the old days of LMS ops were excruciating. Common Cartridge is a good thing, and he should be commended for his leadership on offering a solution to the big audacious higher ed  problem of content distribution and management.

But CCCT is a whole different initiative, one of several federal projects designed to force issues of openness precisely to have the different conversation. Because the IMS conversation only addresses part of the new opportunities. And the CCCT efforts are about tying education to training, jobs and development. Not the other way around.

(inserted note - SCORM dominates in corporate and government and  non-profit learning platform tech as an RFP "checklist" item. IMS dominates in higher ed. They are not mutually exclusive. They are different.)

It is pretty amazing to watch the lines getting drawn. Time to pull up a chair, grab some popcorn and get ready for some great pyrotechnics.