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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Blackboard Inc. has been a company in transition long before CEO Michael Chasen announced his upcoming departure.

In fact, the presence of Blackboard’s longtime chief has been its most visible constant. So the big question coming out of Monday’s news is this: What will the ed-tech behemoth look like, sans Chasen? [snip]

If anything, it’s surprising that Chasen stayed on so long after the private equity buyout. He and Providence had “mutually sat down and worked out the right time frame for there to be a transition,” Chasen said in an interview Monday afternoon. “I’ve been here 15 years,” he said. “While I love Blackboard, and I think there is huge opportunity in front of us, I’ve been doing this since I was 25 years old and looking for there to be a good time for me to phase out.”

Today we are starting to get more insight into the changes, based on Bill’s interview with Jay Bhatt, Blackboard’s new CEO, and coverage of management changes at the company.

What hasn’t changed are the external pressures. Competitors in the core learning management system (LMS) market like Instructure and Desire2Learn are eating into Blackboard’s once-dominant market share. Open source is challenging the traditional licensed software model, just as mobile and cloud-based services challenge native desktop software. Blackboard is an internationally recognizable brand, with a broad array of products and a powerful private equity player behind it. It is, however, still seen as the legacy player.

In his first in-depth interview since joining Blackboard, Bhatt laid out his vision for navigating those challenges. And with less than half a year in the role, he’s marked off two key areas of investment: the online program management market, and international.

Bhatt emphasized the need to grow top-line revenue.

Bhatt was equally emphatic about what his mission at Blackboard isn’t.

“Make no mistake, our goal is to be a top-line growth company,” he said. “Obviously, we want to be profitable, and we want to generate the returns that our investors want. But we need to grow the top line. Software companies that grow the top line effectively are really adding value to their industry, they’re not just monetizing their industry.”

According to the article, there have been some significant management changes at Blackboard as well. Tim Hill (president of global marketing), Siegfried Behrens (president of global sales, recently hired from Microsoft) and David Mills (VP of R&D, formerly of ANGEL and MoodleRooms, key visionary behind xpLor) have all left the company in the past two weeks. Kayvon Beykpour (general manager of Blackboard Mobile and co-founder of TerriblyClever) is also on a leave of absence. Matthew Small has been promoted to president of international, and Jim Kelly from McGraw-Hill has been hired as VP of business development.

Bill indicates that he will have more information and insight on Blackboard’s future direction coming out soon. Read the whole article here.

The post Blackboard Changes Underway: Jay Bhatt Interview and Management Changes appeared first on e-Literate.

• The main stage speakers generally tilted to the right, ideologically (although there was a visible effort to achieve more balance this year). But by and large, that didn’t matter, since the important work of the conference was generally driven by what ed tech startups were available for funding.
• Many of the ed tech entrepreneurs have good intentions but varying degrees of knowledge about the theory and pragmatics of education.
• The degree to which ed tech entrepreneurs need that knowledge varies widely depending on the specifics of what problems they are trying to solve with their offerings.
• The success or failure of these startups are often heavily influenced by the market conditions, which means that we should be thinking about things like improving institutional purchasing practices if we want more from our vendorsThe main difference this year was that the conference was roughly twice the size of last year’s.

I’ll have more to say about the dynamism and/or frothiness of the ed tech startup market in a future post. For now, I want to focus on that continuing disconnect between what happens on the main stage of the conference and what happens in the rest of it, because I think there is a lost opportunity.

The very first night of the conference, one of the keynote speakers trotted out that old Ronald Reagan chestnut:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The obvious implication of the quote, of course, is that the government is so out of touch with what people actually need that they consistently do serious damage, even when they are trying to help. The irony here is that most of the main stage conversation for the rest of the conference was money guys interviewing other money guys about what education needs. The prevailing attitude in the Valley seems to be, “Hey, we built the internet. How hard could education be?”¹ To be fair, there were a few voices representing people with real experience in education on the stage. But only a few.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the conference needs to be turned into a therapy session where educators and investors all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” Rather, I’m talking about providing investors with the context they need (and generally don’t have as part of their professional backgrounds) to judge which investments are going to be impactful and successful. As one conference participant put it to me, “It’s odd that there is almost no discussion of what are the kinds of problems there are in education that money can help.”

Some of this should be about the customer perspective. For example, it was very helpful to have Antioch University Chancellor Felice Nudelman participate in the MOOC panel, in part because she could comment on how administration of at least one university views MOOCs and how they impact their range of strategic choices. The participants could have benefited from a lot more of that. A lot of these investors are most familiar with direct-to-consumer products and have a lot to learn about the complex realities of our school systems. Nor can they just wave the magic “disruption” wand and make those complexities go away. They need to understand them if they are going to invest in companies that actually have a chance of building value.

Some of the main stage discussion should also be from a theoretical perspective. For example, just about every second or third company pitch I heard mentioned something about “adaptive learning.” But I’m pretty sure that not more than 10% of the investors there had any idea what adaptive learning is or when or why it is useful. When I was corresponding with Bill Jerome about what turned out to be his first (and outstanding) e-Literate post, I suggested the following visualization as one possible way to approach the post:

Imagine you’re at the Ed Innovation conference. You’ve just heard a pitch from a startup. Basically, they wrap whatever content customers are using in formative and summative assessments and then use “the big data” to identify which content is most effective and then recommend it to students, modified by personalization algorithms based on student preferences that they’ve deduced by watching their behavior in the LMS. “We want to be the Netflix of learning content.” Now you’re sitting at a bar with a venture capitalist, a university provost, and a member of a state legislature. They all think the pitch from the startup was awesome.

Your job is to explain to these three why the pitch they heard was not as spectacular as they thought it was, and what a genuinely good big data pitch would have to look like.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the investors at the conference need to hear—only before they hear the startup pitches, not afterward, so they can ask smarter questions during the pitch sessions. If you want to give that insight to the investors, then you don’t put Chris Whittle on stage. You put Bill Jerome up there.

To be clear, I think the conference serves a valuable function, and I hope that Deborah Quazzo and Michael Moe continue to run it well into the future. (Given the size of the event this year, I think that is a safe bet.) But as somebody who is interested in ed tech entrepreneurship and investing mainly insofar as they help actually improve education—and as somebody who has faith that companies capable of actually improving education will tend to be profitable investments—I would like to see the conference be as effective as possible at lining up real problems with real money funding real solutions.

1. It is hardly a new phenomenon in American history for the latest captains of industry to think this way. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was “Hey, we built the railroads. How hard could education be?”

The post We’re from the Valley and We’re Here to Help appeared first on e-Literate.

• Sebastian Thrun announced the creation of Udacity on January 23, 2012 as described by Reuters.
• Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng announced the creation of Coursera on April 18, 2012 in this NY Times article.
• MIT and Harvard announced the creation of edX on May 2, 2012 in this MIT article.

And what a year it’s been, especially in terms of the engagement of national media, university presidents and boards on the topic of MOOCs, online education and the future of higher education in general. I doubt there is a higher education conference this year that doesn’t mention MOOCs in one form or another.

But one year is a seriously short time period for higher education and educational technology, which are just not used to changes on this time scale. To give some perspective, consider the following:

• There are quite a few ed tech products that have been or will have been in beta or introductory mode for at least a year when fully released.
• This time one year ago, few people outside of Virginia knew what a Rector or how a board of them might force a president to resign partially based on discussions about MOOCs.
• Many LMS and almost all student information system / ERP selection processes (not even including implementation) take more than a year.

The post Big 3 MOOC Providers Turning One Year Old appeared first on e-Literate.

I have been surprised at how little interest the Open SUNY announcement last week generated in educational media and blog discussions. Perhaps the MOOC portion of the story, which was prominent in several headlines, caused people to assume this was just another school trying to jump on the bandwagon. What is significant, however, is that one of the largest statewide systems in the country is making a multi-pronged approach to reduce time-to-graduation and therefore lower student costs.

In brief, Open SUNY is part of the system’s agenda to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level, and it has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts. The concept for the strategic plan originated in 2009, eventually leading to the report Getting Down to Business: Interim Report of the Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team released in December 2012 [updated].

The Advisory Team recommends “Open SUNY” be officially adopted as the name of SUNY’s new online learning initiative. The term Open SUNY represents an opening up of the educational opportunities that SUNY can provide through the enhancement of existing—and development of new—online education resources, courses and degree programs.

Open SUNY has the clear potential to establish SUNY as the preeminent and most extensive online learning environment in the nation by providing affordable, high quality, convenient, innovative, and flexible online education opportunities for the citizens of the State of New York and beyond. As a collaborative online educational network, the Open SUNY Online Consortium (SUNY campuses and SUNY system offices) will draw on the Power of SUNY to connect students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world, and link them to the best in research-based online teaching and learning environments, practices, and resources. Dedicated to providing access to open and online learning opportunities, Open SUNY will connect learner and community needs and will allow the State University of New York to bring this concept to scale like no other college, university, or system in the United States.

What is Open SUNY?

Open SUNY is a set of 9 interdependent components, as described by the advisory team report [updated]

1. Open SUNY Online Consortium - Comprised of courses from SUNY campuses across the system taught by SUNY faculty, the Open SUNY Online Consortium will collectively offer the most extensive array of online courses and degree programs in the country. This unified approach to online education will provide learners with cost effective options to compete with the rising costs of higher education and enable students taking courses across multiple SUNY institutions to receive financial aid from their home institution.

2. Open SUNY Degree - The term Open SUNY degree refers to functional coordination of policies and practices that “systemness” will allow for, not the actual degree conferrals that are the role of the campuses. The Office of the Provost will seek out campuses to offer new, high needs, online degree programs that will not necessarily require the host campus to develop or provide all the necessary courses to meet credit requirements to confer a degree.

3. Open SUNY Complete - Open SUNY will lead a SUNY-wide project to support degree completion for students who seek to return to college after a significant absence (commonly referred to as ”stopped out”). The Open SUNY Complete program will identify and support former students who wish to return to SUNY to earn and complete a degree. This will occur through use of market analyses and outreach to students who are now considered beyond the normal reach of the originating enrolling college, using a variety of cooperative strategies between SUNY institutions. tate University of New York  Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team Interim Report 4

4. Open SUNY Resources - Open SUNY Resources will build on existing digital repositories, making vast amounts of high quality, credible material available to faculty and learners, while simultaneously staking ground as a world leader in creating new resources by leveraging the vast expertise available across SUNY disciplines.

5. Open SUNY PLA (Prior Learning Assessment) - Increasingly, people acquire and assimilate knowledge both internal and external to the academy. Recognition of the latter, when applied toward college level learning, provides greater access to higher education, decreased time to degree completion, increased retention and completion rates, and significantly lower costs to students. Open SUNY PLA will provide services to campuses that do not wish to establish their own prior learning assessment processes.

6. Open SUNY Workforce - A SUNY-wide strategy for the use of online learning in support of workforce development and adult/continuing education can strengthen SUNY’s role as an economic driver throughout NYS and provide access to SUNY higher education specifically for potential employees, employees and employers statewide (and nationally, who will be attracted to all that SUNY and New York have to offer).

7. Open SUNY International - Open SUNY International will provide a network for learning by linking faculty and students from around the world, demonstrating SUNY’s commitment to international education. In partnership with the Office of Global Affairs, Open SUNY International will provide new opportunities for SUNY students to engage in international and intercultural learning.

8. Open SUNY Research - Open SUNY Research will continue a long tradition of scholarship related to innovation, student access, and learning in open and online environments. Previous support from the Office of the Provost has fostered an active and ongoing research and development agenda with more than 150 conference papers, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal publications, monographs, and presentations directly related to SUNY Learning Network and online education initiatives. Open SUNY Research expands this work and will be supported by a combination of SUNY-wide innovation grants, external funding, formal initiatives, advisory group efforts, and campusbased research activities.

9. Open SUNY Learning Commons - The Open SUNY Learning Commons will be a set of technology applications and online environments to support all Open SUNY services and components. Facilitating communication across campuses, the Learning Commons will bring the user-friendliness of social media applications to the SUNY community. It will leverage advanced open source and commercially available online learning tools, while building communities of practice for students and faculty.

Open SUNY funding comes from a $18.6m funding from NY2020 legislation, and will eventually cost (according to estimates) $3.35m per year in operations.

Announcements

The plan was announced during the SUNY Chancellor’s State of the University address on January 15, 2013. One of the goals of Open SUNY, according to the Chancellor is to expand access to public higher education:

Launch of Open SUNY in 2014, including 10 online bachelor’s degree programs that meet high-need workforce demands, three of which will be piloted in the fall. Open SUNY will leverage online degree offerings at every SUNY campus, making them available to students system-wide using a common set of online tools, including a financial aid consortium so that credits and aid can be received by students across campuses. Chancellor Zimpher said Open SUNY enrollment will reach 100,000 students within three years, making it the largest online education presence of any public institution in the nation.

On March 19, 2013, the Board of Trustees endorsed the plan. One of the motivations for this move was to coordinate campus efforts and gain system-wide synergies, as described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed. One of the key targets for the online expansion will be non-traditional adult learners.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher wants to consolidate online course offerings after nearly 20 years of institutional independence.

“I think the problems the country is trying to solve simply cannot be solved one institution at a time,” Zimpher said in a recent interview. [snip]

SUNY began its online efforts in 1994 at Empire State College. Now, there are 150 online degree programs scattered across all its campuses. SUNY’s extensive offerings are, as it has said in documents related to its new effort, “fragmented” – the source of “countless unexplored opportunities for collaboration, economies of scale and innovation.”

Zimpher ultimately wants to enroll 100,000 new online students in the next several years while also adding new degree programs to train New Yorkers for industries with job openings. To reduce costs to students, she is also trying to speed degree completion times in online degrees to three years.

The chancellor said the whole online effort will target adults.

“We have all these adults who have some education but not enough,” she said. “We’re really trying to grow a major enrollment in an underserved population.”

Ry Rivard’s article also highlights potential pushback from the faculty unions.

A spokesman for the union that represents SUNY academics and instructors said the union had not been consulted about the push.

“SUNY hasn’t brought us into the conversation, hasn’t consulted us,” said Don Feldstein, spokesman for United University Professions, which represents about 32,000 SUNY employees.

SUNY spokesman David Doyle said the system had consulted with faculty by appointing some of them to a task force and by talking to faculty through the “appropriate governance channels,” such as the faculty senate.

How Will We Know?

The part of innovation that I don’t see mentioned enough, at least in the proposal and press releases, is a structured method of determining what works and what doesn’t work. The proposal does mention the metrics that should improve if Open SUNY is successful, but these are all at the initiative level, and not at the individual innovation level [updated].

The impact of Open SUNY will be measured by its contributions to:

• Enhancing and supporting academic excellence of faculty and students;
• Reducing the time required for degree completion;
• Reducing the overall cost of obtaining a SUNY degree;
• Meeting workforce and societal needs;
• Increasing SUNY completion rates;
• Increasing the number of online learners;
• Enhancing the profile of SUNY as an innovative leader in teaching and learning;
• Continuing to reduce a collective carbon footprint; and
• Increasing student and faculty international engagement through online interaction.

Some of these are laudable goals (reducing time to degree and overall cost, increase completion rate), but some are ill-defined (improved outcomes) and some are questionable (increased number of online learners as a goal rather than means to a goal, and enhancing the profile).

But a deeper problem is lack of discussion on determining which innovations to diffuse and which innovations to keep from diffusing. Perhaps there are plans for evaluating courses and programs, but there are no details available that I can find.

Focus on Spreading Innovations, not Creating Innovations

SUNY, of course, is not the first place to develop MOOCs, online courses, OER, open courseware or PLAs, so what is important about this announcement? I think the significance lies in SUNY’s scale and SUNY’s approach. SUNY appears to view the Open SUNY program as a method to spread educational innovations throughout one of the largest systems in the country rather than creating a new pilot program or experiment. SUNY has 468,000 students and plans to add 100,000 more. Rather than trying to create a new innovation, the role of the system is to foster innovation and then take the best ideas and make them available to all.

Although it’s not getting enough attention, Open SUNY will have an outsized impact on the future of online education in the US. State-wide initiatives, whether driven by the systems or the state government, are becoming one of the biggest factors in how higher education is changing in the US. I suspect that other states will be watching SUNY and adopting this model in part or in whole.

Pay attention to Open SUNY – it will matter.

Further Reading

Further reading in chronological order:

• SUNY Strategic Plan, “The Power of SUNY”, 2010
• Associated Press, “SUNY seeks to establish a ‘cradle to career’ future for its graduates”, April 13, 2010
• Empire State College, “Open SUNY Final Proposal” from 2012
• CNY Central, “SUNY Chancellor reveals ambitious agenda”, Jan 15, 2013
• USA Today, “State University of New York pushing online classes”, Jan 15, 2013
• Education News, “Open SUNY Will Mark New York’s Push into Online Education”, Jan 22, 2013
• Open SUNY Press Release, “SUNY Board Outlines Implementation of Open SUNY”, March 19, 2013
• Buffalo Business First, “Online courses to be available across SUNY system”, March 20, 2013
• Chronicle of Higher Education, “SUNY Signals Major Push Toward MOOCs and Other New Educational Models”, March 20, 2013
• Online Colleges, “State University of New York Embraces Online Learning with Open SUNY Initiative”, March 22, 2013
• e-Literate, “SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments”, March 26, 2013
• Inside Higher Education, “Economies of Online Scale”, March 27, 2013

Update 4/02: Fixed editing mistake to say “SUNY, of course, is not the first place to develop . . . “

The post Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making appeared first on e-Literate.

Michael and I have covered the basics of SB520, original text, and some analysis in recent posts. The specific amendments can be viewed at the official CA legislature site.

The themes of the amendments are to:

• shift the approval of the pool of online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC) to the administration and faculty senates of the three systems (University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges);
• tie the administration of the program to the California Virtual Campus;
• restrict each course to matriculated California public higher education and qualifying K-12 students;
• tie the provisions of the bill to funding in the Annual Budget Act; and
• remove any tie to American Council on Education recommendations.

Amended Bill Language

Below are some of the key changes to the bill, with markups (red strikethrough text for deletions, blue for additions).

This bill would establish the California Online Student Access Platform under the administration of the California Open Education Resources Council President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments. The bill would require the platform, among other things, to provide an efficient statewide mechanism for online course providers to offer transferable courses for credit and to create a pool of these online courses. The bill would require the council, among other things, President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments, to develop a list of the 50 most impacted lower division courses, as defined, at the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges that are deemed necessary for program completion or fulfilling transfer requirements, or deemed satisfactory for meeting general education requirements in areas defined as high-demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum and, for each of those 50 courses, to promote the availability of multiple high-quality online course options, as specified.

The bill would establish the California Student Access Pool, through which students could access online courses, and would require the online courses approved by the council President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments, under the bill to be placed in this pool the California Virtual Campus. The bill would require that matriculated students taking of campuses of the University of California, California State University, or California Community Colleges, and California high school pupils, who complete online courses available in the pool and achieving developed through the platform and achieve a passing score on corresponding course examinations, be awarded full academic credit for the comparable an equivalent course at the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges. Because Colleges, as applicable.

The bill would provide that funding for the implementation of this provision would be provided in the annual Budget Act, and express the intent of the Legislature that the receipt of funding by the University of California for the implementation of this provision be contingent on its compliance with its requirements. Because this provision would require community colleges to award academic credit under these circumstances, it would constitute a state-mandated local program.

Section 1 is the findings and declarations portion of the bill, and changes include a focus on faculty partnership.

(e) California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework that increases partnerships between faculty and online course technology providers aimed at allowing students in online courses in strategically selected lower division majors and general education fields to be awarded areas to take online courses for credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems. While providing easy access to these courses, these systems could also continually assess the value of the courses and the rates of student success in utilizing these alternative online pathways.

Section 2 is the major addition to California legislation if enacted, adding section 66409.3 to the Education Code. The phrase “in partnership with faculty members of the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges,” has been added in several areas. Some key section changes

(c) For purposes of accomplishing all of the objectives of the platform as specified in subdivision (b), the California Open Education Resources Council President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments, shall do all of the following:
(1) (A) Develop a list of the 50 most impacted lower division courses at the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges that are deemed necessary for program completion or fulfilling transfer requirements, or deemed satisfactory for meeting general education requirements. requirements, in areas defined as high-demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum.
(B) For purposes of this paragraph, “impacted lower division course” means a course in which, during most academic terms, the number of students seeking to enroll in the course exceeds the number of spaces available in the course.
(2) (A) For each of the 50 courses identified under paragraph (1), solicit and promote appropriate partnerships between online course technology providers and faculty of the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges which, by the fall term of the 2014–15 academic year, shall result in the availability of multiple high-quality online course options in which students may enroll in that term.
(B) An online course developed pursuant to this paragraph shall be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges.

The amendments stipulate that faculty must be associated with each course, and enrollment is limited to matriculated California students.

(3) Create and administer a standardized review and approval process for online courses in which most or all course instruction is delivered online and is open to any interested person. When
reviewing for matriculated students of the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges, or for California high school pupils. No course shall be approved for purposes of this section unless the course has associated with it a faculty sponsor who is a member of the faculty of the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges.

In a significant change, any reference to recommendations coming from the American Council on Education have been removed.

(G)Includes content that has been reviewed and recommended by the American Council on Education.

Courses will be listed in the California Virtual Campus and budgeting applied through the Annual Budget Act.

(d) Online courses approved by the California Open Education Resources Council through the platform pursuant to this section shall be placed in the California Student Access Course Pool, which is hereby created Virtual Campus, through which students may access the courses. Students taking A matriculated student of a campus of the University of California, California State University, or California Community Colleges, or a California high school pupil, who completes an online course available in the California Student Access Course Pool and achieving developed through the platform and achieves a passing score on the corresponding course examination shall be awarded full academic credit for the comparable an equivalent course at the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges, as applicable.
(e) Funding for the implementation of this section shall be provided in the annual Budget Act. It is the intent of the Legislature that, notwithstanding Section 67400, the receipt of funding by the University of California for the implementation of this section be contingent on its compliance with the requirements of this section.

 Response to Faculty Senate Pushback

Many of these changes appear to be in response to faculty senate pushback. The CSU faculty senate “voted unanimously to take a formal position of oppose unless amended with regard to SB 520″. The biggest concern from faculty centered on the involvement of California Open Access Resources Council (COERC), which they felt removed authority over curricula and bypassing existing quality measures in the three systems.

The part of the faculty senate pushback that goes to the intent of the bill, and therefore was not included in any amendments, is their concern over the applicability of online education to lower-division courses.

More specifically, the ASCSU has serious concerns about increasing access to California’s higher education system for lower division students through the use of online courses of study. CSU is a leader in online course delivery for upper division and graduate students. However, research has shown that online courses are not as effective for lower division students, underprepared students, or lower income students. Targeting lower division courses for online delivery puts these very students at greater risk for failure rather than facilitating their access to academic success.

These changes are very recent, so it remains to be seen the affect of these changes on faculty support or resistance.

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