Moodle and Blackboard cut ties — from mfeldstein.com by Michael Feldstein

Excerpt:

Moodle just announced that Blackboard “will transition out of Moodle’s Certified Moodle Partner program in the coming months.”

This is consequential for both Moodle and Blackboard. On the Moodle side, we have written about Moodle’s financial dependence on Blackboard as a partner and how that creates some risk for the community. Since those posts, Moodle has received $6 million in outside investment. According to Moodle Pty’s press release, that investment, combined with a decline in Blackboard’s financial contributions to Moodle made it feasible for Moodle to break off from the partnership.

Note that all the information we have right now is Moodle’s press release; we will circle back to this story once we’ve had a chance to talk to folks from both Moodle and Blackboard and have caught up enough on our blogging schedule that we can give this story the attention that it deserves.

 

 

 
 

Cake, cake, cake. That’s the theme for today’s update! — from Pooja Agarwal and retrievalpractice.org

In addition to loving cake, this sweet delight illustrates how we can best support learning in the classroom: with retrieval practice, formative assessment, and summative assessment.

Read on for yummy goodness:

  • How these three ingredients are similar and different
  • Why this combination makes for a perfect cake
  • Why learning is not a bake off, cupcake war, or throw down (sorry to disappoint!)

Three key ingredients for learning
Chances are, you’re familiar with this two-part process:

Formative assessment: Checking on and monitoring students’ learning, which provides teachers and students with information about progress. We think of formative assessment as inserting a toothpick to see how the cake is doing while it’s baking.

Summative assessment: Discovering what students know by measuring learning. This is when we get to celebrate accomplishments with cake and also get a sense of what can be improved upon.

But where does retrieval practice fit in?

Retrieval practice: Learning how to crack an egg, measure ingredients, and mix it all together. This is when we embrace mistakes rather than emphasize perfection, because challenges are a good thing for learning.

What does this mean for you?

Key similarity: All three involve bringing information to mind. In other words, they all require retrieval! From the outside, it can look like one seamless process, and that’s a good thing. Learning isn’t linear and neither is retrieval.

Key difference: Retrieval practice doesn’t require data collection. Nothing needs to be recorded in the gradebook. Retrieval is a no-stakes opportunity when students can experiment, be challenged, and improve over time.

Takeaway: For powerful learning, we must be mindful of which ingredients we’re using, which stage we’re in, and how we can incorporate even more retrieval practice throughout the entire learning (and baking) process.

 



Also, be sure to see their guides here:

Go to retrievalpractice.org/library to see some great guides on using retrieval practice



 

Where teachers can find free audiobooks for their students — from thetechedvocate.org by Matthew Lynch

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Audiobooks are fantastic ways to bring stories to life in your classroom and keep students engaged. Reading Rockets explains, “Audiobooks have traditionally been used in schools by teachers of second-language learners, learning-disabled students, and struggling readers or nonreaders. In many cases, audiobooks have proven successful in providing a way for these students to access literature and enjoy books.” However, educators have found that audiobooks benefit all students!

Unfortunately, audiobooks are pricey, so you should not expect your students to have them at home. You should also not plan on spending large amounts of money to build your audiobook collection for your classroom. For instance, the widely popular Audible site for downloadable audiobooks is a subscription-based service, but it only allows you to choose one book per month. Instead, take advantage of the wealth of free audiobooks available for teachers and students.

 

 

Get started with rubrics — from thecreativeeducator.com by Melinda Kolk
Make assessment a classroom conversation

Excerpt:

A rubric is an assessment tool that clearly outlines expectations for student work. A rubric describes which performances will be assessed and specifies the criteria for assessing them. Rubrics can be used throughout the process of student work, making them useful for project-based learning implementations.

Because rubrics describe what high performance looks like, they are great tools to help students gauge their work and provide an opportunity for conversation between students and teachers about high-quality work.

Creating a rubric for the final product and various components of project work can ensure a more accurate, specific, and useful assessment.

A rubric is an authentic assessment tool that:

  • Provides clear expectations for a project.
  • Considers the product as well as the entire project-building process.
  • Enumerates the performances on which students will be evaluated.
  • Explains what constitutes excellence for each performance.
  • Helps students understand what they need to do to excel.
  • Prevents subjectivity and bias during the evaluation process.

 

 

Also see:

 

this graphic links to a search for rubrics out at FacultyFocus.com

 

 

 

From DSC:
Rubrics need to be very carefully designed/constructed though; otherwise rubrics can spoon-feed students the answers in an age where problem solving capabilities are really needed.

 

 

 

Experiences in self-determined learning — a free download/PDF file from uni-oldenburg.de by Lisa Blaschke, Chris Kenyon, & Stewart Hase (Eds.)

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

An Introduction to Self-Determined Learning (Heutagogy)

Summary
There is a good deal that is provocative in the theory and principles surrounding self-determined learning or heutagogy. So, it seems appropriate to start off with a, hopefully, eyebrow-raising observation. One of the key ideas underpinning self-determined learning is that learning, and educational and training are quite different things. Humans are born to learn and are very good at it. Learning is a natural capability and it occurs across the human lifespan, from birth to last breath. In contrast, educational and training systems are concerned with the production of useful citizens, who can contribute to the collective economic good. Education and training is largely a conservative enterprise that is highly controlled, is product focused, where change is slow, and the status quo is revered. Learning, however, is a dynamic process intrinsic to the learner, uncontrolled except by the learner’s mental processes. Self-determined learning is concerned with understanding how people learn best and how the methods derived from this understanding can be applied to educational systems. This chapter provides a relatively brief introduction of the origins, the key principles, and the practice of self-determined learning. It also provides a number of resources to enable the interested reader to take learning about the approach further.

Contributors to this book come from around the world: they are everyday practitioners of self-determined learning who have embraced the approach. In doing so, they have chosen the path less taken and set off on a journey of exploration and discovery – a new frontier – as they implement heutagogy in their homes, schools, and workplaces. Each chapter was written with the intent of sharing the experiences of practical applications of heutagogy, while also encouraging those just starting out on the journey in using self-determined learning. The authors in this book are your guides as you move forward and share with you the lessons they have learned along the way. These shared experiences are meant to be read – or dabbled in – in any way that you want to read them. There is no fixed recipe or procedure for tackling the book contents.

At the heart of self-determined learning is that the learner is at the centre of the learning process. Learning is intrinsic to the learner, and the educator is but an agent, as are many of the resources so freely available these days. It is now so easy to access knowledge and skills (competencies), and in informal settings we do this all the time, and we do it well. Learning is complex and non-linear, despite what the curricula might try to dictate. In addition, every brain is different as a result of its experience (as brain research tells us). Each brain will also change as learning takes place with new hypotheses, new needs, and new questions forming, as new neuronal connections are created.

Heutagogy also doesn’t have anything directly to do with self-determination theory (SDT). SDT is a theory of motivation related to acting in healthy and effective ways (Ryan & Deci, 2000). However, heutagogy is related to the philosophical notion of self-determinism and shares a common belief in the role of human agency in behavior.

The idea of human agency is critical to self-determined learning, where learning is learner-directed. Human agency is the notion that humans have the capacity to make choices and decisions, and then act on them in the real world. However, how experiences and learning bring people to make the choices and decisions that they do make, and what actions they may then take is a very complex matter. What we are concerned with in self-determined learning is that people have agency with respect to how, what, and when they learn. It is something that is intrinsic to each individual person. Learning occurs in the learner’s brain, as the result of his or her past and present experiences.

 

The notion of placing the learner at the centre of the learning experience is a key principle of self-determined learning. This principle is the opposite of teacher-centric or, perhaps more accurately curriculum-centric, approaches to learning. This is not to say that the curriculum is not important, just that it needs to be geared to the learner – flexible, adaptable, and be a living document that is open to change.

Teacher-centric learning is an artifact of the industrial revolution when an education system was designed to meet the needs of the factories (Ackoff & Greenberg, 2008) and to “make the industrial wheel go around” (Hase & Kenyon, 2013b). It is time for a change to learner-centred learning and the time is right with easy access to knowledge and skills through the Internet, high-speed communication and ‘devices’. Education can now focus on more complex cognitive activities geared to the needs of the 21st century learner, rather than have its main focus on competence (Blaschke & Hase, 2014; Hase & Kenyon, 2013a).

 

 

 

What is a learning ecosystem? And how does it support corporate strategy? — from ej4.com by Ryan Eudy

Excerpt:

learning ecosystem is a system of people, content, technology, culture, and strategy, existing both within and outside of an organization, all of which has an impact on both the formal and informal learning that goes on in that organization.

The word “ecosystem” is worth paying attention to here. It’s not just there to make the term sound fancy or scientific. A learning ecosystem is the L&D equivalent of an ecosystem out in the wild. Just as a living ecosystem has many interacting species, environments, and the complex relationships among them, a learning ecosystem has many people and pieces of content, in different roles and learning contexts, and complex relationships.

Just like a living ecosystem, a learning ecosystem can be healthy or sick, nurtured or threatened, self-sustaining or endangered. Achieving your development goals, then, requires an organization to be aware of its own ecosystem, including its parts and the internal and external forces that shape them.

 

From DSC:
Yes, to me, the concept/idea of a learning ecosystem IS important. Very important. So much so, I named this blog after it.

Each of us as individuals have a learning ecosystem, whether we officially recognize it or not. So do the organizations that we work for. And, like an ecosystem out in nature, a learning ecosystem is constantly morphing, constantly changing.

We each have people in our lives that help us learn and grow, and the people that were in our learning ecosystems 10 years ago may or may not still be in our current learning ecosystems. Many of us use technologies and tools to help us learn and grow. Then there are the spaces where we learn — both physical and virtual spaces. Then there are the processes and procedures we follow, formally and/or informally. Any content that helps us learn and grow is a part of that ecosystem. Where we get that content can change, but obtaining up-to-date content is a part of our learning ecosystems. I really appreciate streams of content in this regard — and tapping into blogs/websites, especially via RSS feeds and Feedly (an RSS aggregator that took off when Google Reader left the scene).

The article brings up a good point when it states that a learning ecosystem can be “healthy or sick, nurtured or threatened, self-sustaining or endangered.” That’s why I urge folks to be intentional about maintaining and, better yet, consistently enhancing their learning ecosystems. In this day and age where lifelong learning is now a requirement to remain in the workforce, each of us needs to be intentional in this regard.

 

 

Report: Accessibility in Digital Learning Increasingly Complex — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC)has introduced a series of original reports to keep people in education up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of digital learning. The first report covers accessibility and addresses both K-12 and higher education. The series is being produced by OLC’s Research Center for Digital Learning & Leadership.

The initial report addresses four broad areas tied to accessibility:

  • The national laws governing disability and access and how they apply to online courses;
  • What legal cases exist to guide online course design and delivery in various educational settings;
  • The issues that emerge regarding online course access that might be unique to higher ed or to K-12, and which ones might be shared; and
  • What support online course designers need to generate accessible courses for learners across the education life span (from K-12 to higher education).

 

 

Canvas catches, & maybe passes, Blackboard — from by Lindsay McKenzie
Blackboard dominated the U.S. learning management system market for 20 years, but new data show its cloud-based competitor edging past it.

Excerpt:

Canvas has unseated Blackboard Learn as the leading LMS at U.S. colleges and universities, according to new data from MindWires Consulting.

In a blog post on [7/8/18], Michael Feldstein, partner at MindWires Consulting and co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, wrote that Canvas now has 1,218 installations at U.S. institutions, compared with Blackboard’s 1,216. Although the two-figure difference may seem insignificant — and Blackboard and some of its allies say the data don’t accurately reflect the two companies’ relative reach — most analysts agree that Canvas’s ascent, largely at Blackboard’s expense, is noteworthy.

“This is a stunning development for a company that seemed to have established an unbreakable market dominance a decade ago,” wrote Feldstein.

At its peak in 2006, Blackboard controlled approximately 70 percent of the U.S. and Canadian market, with its nearest competitors “far, far behind,” said Feldstein. But slowly Canvas, and others such as Moodle and D2L’s Brightspace, have closed the gap.

 

 

The market share for Learning Management Systems

 

 

 



Also, you might want to know about the upcoming FREE opportunity to learn more about Instructure (the maker of Canvas), where Canvas is heading, and some other keynotes re: K-12 and higher education.

Next week, Instructure is hosting a conference that’s focusing on Canvas, and it’s called InstructureCarn. You can register — for free — to watch the live stream of all 5 keynotes at InstructureCarn, and Instructure will send you an email reminder to tune into the following keynote speakers and sessions:

  • Tuesday, July 24 @ 5pm MST Josh Coates, CEO, Instructure
  • Wednesday, July 25 @ 9am MST Adora Svitak, Author, Speaker, Advocate
  • Wednesday, July 25 @ 1:30pm MST Jared Stein, VP of Higher Ed Strategy, Instructure
  • Thursday, July 26 @ 9am MST Michael Bonner, 2nd Grade Teacher, Visionary Leader
  • Thursday, JULY 26 @ 1:30PM MST Mitch Benson, SVP of Product, Instructure

Click here to attend virtually!
The times listed above are in Mountain Standard Time (MST)– so you may need to convert those times to your time zone.

 



 

 

Teaching with Technology in 2018 — from thejournal.com by David Nagel
In our third-annual ed tech survey, teachers reveal an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward tech in the classroom and its impact on teaching, learning and professional development.

Excerpt:

Teachers are growing fonder of technology every year. Even the dreaded mobile phone is gaining acceptance as a classroom tool, at least among those who participated in THE Journal’s third-annual Teaching with Technology Survey.

Teacher Attitudes Toward Tech
While teachers in each of the preceding survey were, for the most part, pumped up about tech for learning, this year’s results reveal an evolving positivism not just about tech, but about the direction tech is heading.

Exactly three-quarters of teachers in the survey indicated tech has had an extremely positive (38.37 percent) or mostly positive (36.63 percent) impact on education. The remaining 25 percent said tech has had both positive and negative effects on education. Zero respondents said tech had a negative or extremely negative impact.

Responses about tech’s impact on student learning were similar, with 84 percent saying it’s had a positive impact, 6 percent saying it’s had a negative impact and 10 percent being neutral.

 

 

 

10 steps to achieving active learning on a budget — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
Active learning often means revamping classrooms to enable more collaborative, hands-on student work — and that can be costly. Here’s how to achieve the pedagogical change without the high expense.

Excerpt:

Active learning is a great way to increase student excitement and participation, facilitate different kinds of learning activities, help people develop skills in small group work, promote discussion, boost attendance and give an outlet for technology usage that stays on track. It also requires remaking classrooms to enable that hands-on, collaborative student work — and that can often mean a six-figure price tag. But at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH, a $12,000 experiment proved successful enough that the institution now sports two permanent active learning classrooms as well as a brand-new active learning lab. Here are the 10 steps this school with just under 2,000 students followed on its road to active learning victory.

 

the article being linked here is entitled 10 steps to achieving active learning on a budget

 

 

Also see:

 

 

 

The title of this article is: Schools can not get facial recognition tech for free. Should they?

Schools can not get facial recognition tech for free. Should they? — from wired.com by Issie Lapowsky

Excerpt:

Over the past two years, RealNetworks has developed a facial recognition tool that it hopes will help schools more accurately monitor who gets past their front doors. Today, the company launched a website where school administrators can download the tool, called SAFR, for free and integrate it with their own camera systems. So far, one school in Seattle, which Glaser’s kids attend, is testing the tool and the state of Wyoming is designing a pilot program that could launch later this year. “We feel like we’re hitting something there can be a social consensus around: that using facial recognition technology to make schools safer is a good thing,” Glaser says.

 

From DSC:
Personally, I’m very uncomfortable with where facial recognition is going in some societies. What starts off being sold as being helpful for this or that application, can quickly be abused and used to control its citizens. For example, look at what’s happening in China already these days!

The above article talks about these techs being used in schools. Based upon history, I seriously question whether humankind can wisely handle the power of these types of technologies.

Here in the United States, I already sense a ton of cameras watching each of us all the time when we’re out in public spaces (such as when we are in grocery stores, or gas stations, or in restaurants or malls, etc.).  What’s the unspoken message behind those cameras?  What’s being stated by their very presence around us?

No. I don’t like the idea of facial recognition being in schools. I’m not comfortable with this direction. I can see the counter argument — that this tech could help reduce school shootings. But I think that’s a weak argument, as someone mentally unbalanced enough to be involved with a school shooting likely won’t be swayed/deterred by being on camera. In fact, one could argue that in some cases, being on the national news — with their face being plastered all over the nation — might even put gas on the fire.

 

 

Glaser, for one, welcomes federal oversight of this space. He says it’s precisely because of his views on privacy that he wants to be part of what is bound to be a long conversation about the ethical deployment of facial recognition. “This isn’t just sci-fi. This is becoming something we, as a society, have to talk about,” he says. “That means the people who care about these issues need to get involved, not just as hand-wringers but as people trying to provide solutions. If the only people who are providing facial recognition are people who don’t give a &*&% about privacy, that’s bad.”

 

 

 

The title of this article being linked here is: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
Per this week’s Next e-newsletter from edsurge.com

Take the University of San Francisco, which deploys facial recognition software in its dormitories. Students still use their I.D. card to swipe in, according to Edscoop, but the face of every person who enters a dorm is scanned and run through a database, and alerts the dorm attendant when an unknown person is detected. Online students are not immune: the technology is also used in many proctoring tools for virtual classes.

The tech raises plenty of tough issues. Facial-recognition systems have been shown to misidentify young people, people of color and women more often than white men. And then there are the privacy risks: “All collected data is at risk of breach or misuse by external and internal actors, and there are many examples of misuse of law enforcement data in other contexts,” a white paper by the Electronic Frontier foundation reads.

It’s unclear whether such facial-scanners will become common at the gates of campus. But now that cost is no longer much of an issue for what used to be an idea found only in science fiction, it’s time to weigh the pros and cons of what such a system really means in practice.

 

 

Also see:

  • As facial recognition technology becomes pervasive, Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) issues a call for regulation — from techcrunch.com by Jonathan Shieber
    Excerpt:
    Technology companies have a privacy problem. They’re terribly good at invading ours and terribly negligent at protecting their own. And with the push by technologists to map, identify and index our physical as well as virtual presence with biometrics like face and fingerprint scanning, the increasing digital surveillance of our physical world is causing some of the companies that stand to benefit the most to call out to government to provide some guidelines on how they can use the incredibly powerful tools they’ve created. That’s what’s behind today’s call from Microsoft President Brad Smith for government to start thinking about how to oversee the facial recognition technology that’s now at the disposal of companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and government security and surveillance services across the country and around the world.

 

 

 

 

Delaying the grade: How to get students to read feedback — from cultofpedagogy.com by Kristy Louden

Excerpt:

This meant that I could return papers with comments but without grades.

And from this a whole new system was born: Return papers to students with only feedback. Delay the delivery of the actual grade so student focus moves from the grade to the feedback.

The simple act of delaying the grade meant that students had to think about their writing. They had to read their own writing—after a few weeks away from it—and digest my comments, which allowed them to better recognize what they did well or not so well. The response from students was extremely positive; they understood the benefit of rereading their essays and paying attention to feedback. One boy said, “Mrs. Louden, you’re a genius. I’ve never read what a teacher writes on my essay before, and now I have to.”

 

From DSC:
I’m including higher ed in the tags here…as this could be effective for college students as well. College students who have long played the game of getting the grade…simply playing the system and putting the ownership and development of their learning much lower on the priority list. Let’s help students stop outsourcing their learning.

 

 

 

What teaching that lifts all students could look like — from kqed.org by Kristina Rizga

An initial comment from DSC:
I recently ran across this article. Although it’s from 12/24/15, it has some really solid points and strategies in it. Definitely worth a read if you are a teacher or even a parent with school age kids.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

…his comments in class about the substance of her ideas, his feedback on her writing, the enthusiasm in his voice when he discussed her thinking. Over the course of a year, that proof solidified into a confidence that couldn’t be easily shaken anymore. It was that pride in her intellect that gave her the fortitude and resilience to cut through many racial stereotypes and negative myths as she made her way through high school and then Boston University.

For McKamey, the most important value driving her teaching and coaching is her conviction that being a good teacher means hearing, seeing, and succeeding with all students—regardless of how far a student is from the teacher’s preconceived notions of what it means to be ready to learn. When teachers are driven by a belief that all of their students can learn, they are able to respond to the complexity of their students’ needs and to adjust if something is not working for a particular individual or group of students.

 

 

The best way to improve teaching and reduce the achievement gaps, McKamey argues, is to allow teachers to act as school-based researchers and leaders, justifying classroom reforms based on the broad range of performance markers of their students: daily grades, the quality of student work and the rate of its production, engagement, effort, attendance, and student comments. That means planning units together and then spending a lot of time analyzing the iterative work the students produce. This process teaches educators to recognize that there are no standard individuals, and there are as many learning trajectories as there are people. 

 

 

 

No-quiz retrieval practice techniques — from thatboycanteach.co.uk by Aidan Severs

Excerpt:

So, although quizzing is one popular (and easy) way of ensuring that facts are remembered and recalled, here are some other ways to prompt retrieval of information from the long-term memory. All of these activities could be done by individuals, in pairs or in groups:

  • Free Recall
  • Retrieve Taking
  • Think Pair Share
  • Two Things
  • Last Lesson, Last Week, Last Month (or Can You Still?)
  • Sorting
  • Linking
  • Stories, Songs, Rhymes and Mnemonics

 

 
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