By Phil Hill. Over the past two weeks Blackboard had another round of layoffs, likely due to the company missing financial targets. While one estimate places the number at roughly 200, from what I have heard the number is closer to 90 – 100 people let go. I asked the company for commentary on the layoffs and associated reorganization. More...
By Michael Feldstein. Phil and I gave our first ever joint keynote at the OLC conference this week. We didn’t want to just do dueling PowerPoints, so instead we tried a format that I have been calling a social constructivist keynote. Each of us would present on a topic for a few minutes, and then the two of us would talk about it for a few minutes. More...
By Phil Hill. I have written several posts looking at the new College Scorecard and its inherent flaws in the data, often starting with observations from Russ Poulin at WCET. Today Susan Svrluga, education reporter at the Washington Post, posted a new article co-written by me and Russ and titled “Hundreds of colleges missing from Obama’s College Scorecard?”. The gist of the article is taking a holistic view of data problems and why they exist. More...
By Phil Hill. I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in October 2014, and thanks to revised data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data provides an anchor for the summary. More...
By Michael Feldstein. My comments in today’s NPR article about Knewton are getting some attention on Twitter. One comment in particular, actually. The one where I accused Knewton CEO Jose Ferriera of selling snake oil. More...
By Michael Feldstein. This doesn’t exactly come as a shock, but Instructure has filed for an IPO, and is expecting a post-IPO valuation of somewhere between $500 million and $800 million. Whenever a private company does this, they have to file a form called an S-1 with the SEC, which contains all kinds of financial and strategic information. More...
By Phil Hill. On Monday Robert Talbert, associate professor at Grand Valley State University and author of the Casting Out Nines blog, wrote a provocative and important post titled “Active learning as an ethical issue”. More...
By Phil Hill. The overuse of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory has rightly been criticized in education circles for years. I say rightly in that judging a non-commodity public good with the same theory as disk drives is a silly notion without some extensive analysis to back up that extrapolation. More...
By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Y.L. Teresa Ting from the Universitá della Calabria (Italy) has an Italian charm and looks fabulous as she takes the stage. Today she focused on the question on how the CLIL format can answer the many challenges of educating pupils in a foreign language, especially if one takes into account that the outcomes of native language courses keep having flaws. She is also clearly a teacher, narrating, yet paying attention at our focus, and she makes us do things (takes me back to the classroom).I was following with pleasure, until the sentence "students need good textbooks more then ever, as you never know what they will find on the internet" - okay, just imagine my face when hearing that sentence! Fun though, and the full keynote was definitely of interest. Read more...
By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Great initiative to combine digital writing and creativity all through the month of November 2015. I learn by writing. It always feels like the movement of my fingers on my keyboard makes me think more clearly, and even pushes thoughts right into the open. So this Digital Writing Month initiative (#DigiWriMo), organised by the Hybrid Pedagogy bloggers (Maha Bali, Sarah Honeychurch, and Kevin Hogdson), is right up my alley. The #DigiWriMo will push people to engage in digital writing and creativity during the month of November. Read more...
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