By Michael Feldstein. One piece of news we never circled back to after the crush of LMS conference season updates was the ending of the Blackboard's membership in the Moodle Partner program. To recap, Moodle Pty., the company that runs Moodle development and owns the Moodle trademark, suddenly announced right around BbWorld that it was ending Blackboard's membership in the Moodle Partner program. More...

By Michael Feldstein. A while back, I wrote a post about the four levels of Empirical Education. To recap, they are as follows:

1. Intuitively empirical: Intuitively empirical educators are curious about their students and try to figure out how to help them when they see them struggling. They try different things and pick up tricks in their teaching as they become more experienced in the classroom.
2. Mindfully empirical: This means that the educators try to create as many opportunities as possible to evaluate how their students are doing and make little (or big) adjustments to her teaching strategies constantly as they get to know their students better. Intuitively empirical educators are empirical in the moment. Mindfully empirical educators are empirical by design.
3. Metacognitively empirical: Metacognitively empirical educators have made the leap from assessing their students to assessing themselves. When a class struggles with a concept semester after semester, metacognitively empirical educators don't just accept that the topic is hard. They ask whether their teaching strategies might be part of the problem. They challenge their own beliefs about good teaching.
4. Socially empirical: When educators reach the level of being socially empirical, it means that they have begun to see that testing teaching strategies and learning to improve can be a shared endeavor. It can be a discipline, with common language and standards of evidence for effectiveness. Socially empirical educators see teaching not just as an art that is personal and ineffable but as a craft that can be taught and learned, and maybe even as a science that can be advanced through shared research and peer review.

This isn't just a taxonomy. More...

By Phil Hill. We have published market share data measured by total institutional enrollment instead of institutional count in several posts at e-Literate over the years, within the twice-annual reports of our LMS Market Analysis service, and for several of our premium subscribers of the same service. In July of this year we reported that Canvas had overtaken Blackboard as the market leader in US higher education in terms of institutional adoptions as well as scaled by enrollment. These last two posts got a fair amount of media and vendor attention. More...

By Phil Hill. It has now been four weeks since Chegg announced a data breach compromising personal information of up to 40 million users. Cue the crickets because the only coverage in ed tech press thus far is from EdWeek, which focuses on the K-12 market. That's a shame, because if ed tech companies want a case study to help understand the implications of FBI warnings or the European Union's new Global Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR), this example from Chegg should be illustrative. The same goes for institutions. More...

By Phil Hill. We should have posted this a week ago, but we at e-Literate are in the midst of Fall 2018 conference season, and we'd love to connect with people at the various conferences we're attending. We're going for the divide-and-conquer strategy this year. More...