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00:00:01
We all over the place
216 Plays2 months ago
Title Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBKKo43lJ-E
This week, we dive into the non-regulatory issues surrounding EdTech ecosystem usage where multiple apps are used within a course. Controlling which apps can be used can trigger academic freedom concerns, but how can educators gain a more complete view of student learning? We discuss the complexities of tracking and data analytics across various platforms. Plus, we explore how centralized data approaches can benefit institutions trying to solve this problem. This discussion gives insights on leadership changes in edtech and debates on data ownership and contract management. Tune in to discover how these dynamics are shaping the future of online education!
00:00 Welcome back to final podcast episode, everyone!
05:52 LMS can't track third-party academic tools usage.
09:22 Limited edtech implementation, mainly administrative and monitoring.
13:35 Interviews revealed schools' attendance solutions, maintaining confidentiality.
15:25 Programs are credit-hour based, not clock-hour tracked.
17:46 Universities struggle with unified edtech tool integration.
23:03 Overseeing student activities on platforms is lacking.
27:01 Holistic learning tools adopted piecemeal across institutions.
28:54 Institutional policy drives centralized data integration efforts.
33:40 Holistic student learning focus benefits larger institutions.
35:07 Decentralized universities struggle with modern technology implementation.
39:50 Community college systems balance variety and centralization.
41:31 LMS VLE issues led to LTI ecosystem shift.
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Transcript
Season Transition or Finale Discussion
00:00:09
Speaker
welcome to Online Education Across the Atlantic. And after we've taken a little bit of a break this summer in July and August, it's great to get back together. And I don't know if we consider this the final episode of the first season or a transition episode, but we're going to be looking at ah what changes to make in the podcast. So let's just treat it as this is the final episode of our first season of the podcast.
00:00:34
Speaker
So looking forward to it and great to see everybody here at the beginning of the school year, at least for the Northern Hemisphere.
Summer Experiences: Cheese and Baking
00:00:42
Speaker
So if you two had a good summer, any exciting stuff? ah Neil, I know you just came back from France, and but other than that, anything notable about your past two months? Well, not really. I've kind of been buried in work ah That's been punctuated by holidays. So, you know as you are probably aware in the in the sort of independent life you take work as And when it comes and sometimes it comes in holiday periods which makes for interesting interesting times But it was nice to have that busyness ah punctuated with some holidays and get to France and eat lots of cheese Very nice cheese as well. So yeah, I can't complain
00:01:24
Speaker
they They do tend to know how to do that over there. Morgan, how how have you been the past two months? I've been good. um No holidays to France, no cheese fists for me, but um I've been baking bread. So so that's been fun. I did see your carrot cake online the other day. Yeah.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. It was more, it must have been more of an eating victory than a visual victory on that. Yeah, the the ah the topping, which was delicious, it was a brazil Brazilian carrot cake, bola de Sonora, or something like that, excuse my Portuguese, but it has a chocolate topping, which is delicious, but as messy as all get out, and I didn't make it stiff enough. So it it ran all over the place, but I've been making buns.
00:02:14
Speaker
So one of the things I miss from growing up is buns, sweet buns. So iced buns, bath buns, Chelsea buns, those sorts of things. And I've been making those. um and And I have finally are making ones that I am proud of. So that's been my my last couple of months.
00:02:35
Speaker
Oh,
Lens Replacement Surgery Experience
00:02:36
Speaker
great. Well, for me, all I have are two new eyes. So I've had a lens replacement in both of my eyes, and I'm getting used to the bizarre situation where I can check my watch, check my phone without my glasses. I can go to the grocery store now and actually read what I'm buying instead of figuring out do I get the red or the yellow blurry box in front of me. So I just had my second lens replacement on Tuesday, and ah I'm actually quite excited about this. Having new eyes is a good thing. So motorists in the local area can kind of sigh a brief sigh of relief. yeah
00:03:13
Speaker
I wasn't a Mr. Magoo. It was more of a, had trouble reading. So no, it's more my wife having less of a situation where I come home having bought the wrong thing from the grocery store. And she and my daughters always said, did you not bring your glasses to the store? Now I can actually read.
00:03:31
Speaker
so ah So it's been, yeah, not holiday busy, but it's been busy with that and fun with US regulations, as always.
New Rules for Online Course Attendance Tracking
00:03:40
Speaker
And on that topic, that's what we're going to cover today, but not the regulation angle.
00:03:46
Speaker
So if anybody's been following it, we've had new, new regulatory final rules. Well, it's not the final rules. It's the official rules. They have a public comment. Then the Department of Education can put out final rules and it's on distance education. And there's a particular aspect of it for online courses, not just online programs, but even just individual courses. And I know there's a translation issue there because in the UK, you call your programs courses quite often. But each individual course has to take attendance if this proposal goes through. And I've written quite a bit about how that justice is not feasible in today's environment, because when they say attendance,
00:04:32
Speaker
It's not just, ah did you log in? It's not just a here. It's actual academic engagement activity. So I've submitted an assignment. I've participated in a discussion thread that's on the course content topic. I've taken a quiz. I've ah participated in an online lecture or something that's academically engaging.
00:04:58
Speaker
And the key point of ah my analysis is saying the Department of Ed is claiming that this is easy to do. but It'll take 10 hours to set it up at the institution and then 10 minutes per day of additional burden to simply report that out. And it's very clear that what they're trying to say is it's already in the LMS. All you have to do is report it.
00:05:23
Speaker
And I had a couple of posts saying that's not accurate, that when you're talking about academic engagement, you may be doing that. You might be doing a Zoom or a Microsoft Teams session and watching in ah a video, whether it's synchronous or asynchronous, having a conversation.
00:05:42
Speaker
You might be doing some sort of enhanced engagement discussion thing, such as the Horizon for 42 Lines. ah There are others that do this as well. Piazza is another tool where people do um their engagement. And there's a whole bunch of things, assessment tools. And even the big companies, the publisher courseware, when people say they're doing coursework, they might be in the courseware, such as a Pearson MyLabs.
00:06:11
Speaker
or a mind tap from Cengage. You might be engaging there if you're a student. And so the question, what I was pointing out is saying, if a student's in one of these third, let's call them third party platforms, and doing academic engagement, that the LMS doesn't necessarily know about that at all.
Challenges of Tracking Attendance in Online Education
00:06:32
Speaker
The regulatory impact is it means faculty would have to take attendance manually in most cases, unless it's a highly centralized
00:06:41
Speaker
curriculum, but it's just the whole assumption that the LMS knows all is a wrong assumption. Went further into it saying, look at the LTI, the learning tools interoperability standard. That can launch an application so that you don't have to sign on multiple times and it understands that. And it can get graded items back, such as here's what the student did and what their grade or their mark was.
00:07:08
Speaker
But what it doesn't do is keep track of things such as, oh, they're we're not finished with this assignment, but today the student was engaged in doing academic information but engagement. So that information is not sent back to the LMS. So there's a ah bunch of explanations from a regulatory standpoint. What we want to talk about today is let's separate the regulation and just get into Putting the regulations aside, why are we in the situation we're in? I mean, people tend to assume that in edtech, everything's being tracked.
00:07:46
Speaker
And that might be true in individual apps, but we don't have holistic views organized around the learner. So that's what we're going to explore today is separating it from the regulations, but just talking about that in general. So to get started, ah let me check my assumptions from what you guys are seeing. Are you seeing like how often do you see a case where a school might have a holistic view of student activity across multiple applications. And start with you, Neil, since you're all refreshed from your vacation. What what are you seeing with the schools that you work with?
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah it's patchy I think. I mean I kind of had a little look into to this in terms of to get a sense of how widespread these kind of practices are and I guess for me although we're not necessarily talking about learning analytics directly, kind of in the yeah UK, it's more likely to come under that banner and a product that's been implemented in that way. And so there's kind of a couple of interesting sources around that kind of thing. So there's um a survey that's run by Usizer, which is an organization over here. And I think, you know, off the
00:09:06
Speaker
institutions that they surveyed, there was kind of 17, 22% that have a learning analytic solution. One of the really popular ones, one of my popular ones over here is a product called stream by solution path.
00:09:20
Speaker
they've got 25 university clients. So that kind of gives you a bit of a sense of the number of universities that are implementing those kinds of solutions. So not not a massive amount. I think as well, in respect to those implementations, I don't get the sense that they are um encompassing the whole EdTech ecosystem. They're really just integrations of things like the LMS, of ELE, student information systems and other the other kind of more administrative systems and maybe attendance monitoring.
Attendance Monitoring and Mental Health Support
00:10:00
Speaker
There is GISC have a learning analytics service and they have an attendance monitor monitoring element to that.
00:10:08
Speaker
So that there there is activity happening there, but I don't think there is activity that encompasses the whole so the whole suite. I think for for the SolutionPath product, I think lecture capture and VLE data, but I don't get the sense it's looking at you know the the array of edtech tools that might be in the kind of the suite of things that the university uses.
00:10:34
Speaker
So yeah, yeah so this this there's a small number of universities, I guess, in the grand scheme of things that are doing this kind of thing, but it's not as comprehensive as everything in that EdTech suite. So just a quick point of clarity here. So when when you talk about attendance monitoring, that came out of TIFF, didn't it? Out of the the Teaching Excellence Framework. Wasn't there more of a desire to capture attendance generally, not just in online, but in all courses.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, there has been that and and you know, we institutions have particular reporting requirements for international students on tier four visas where they have to do that as well. So, um you know, some of the, you know, benefits of some of the attendance monitoring stuff has been mentioned has has been in relation to the ease of the the benefits it offers around that kind of level of reporting. um So yeah, they there's there's definitely been drivers for more attendance monitoring.
00:11:34
Speaker
And it is across the board rather than just going online. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And i arguably, well, I think it's more focused on on campus than online, really. Yeah. well One one ah further clarification I'd like to understand and then check with Morgan's background. when When you're talking, particularly in the UK context, attendance taking, does that include like interim state? like I haven't completed an assignment. There's no end state. There's no grade.
00:12:05
Speaker
But I was working on this today, and i and somebody can verify that was academic content. does Does it include that aspect, not just the number of apps, but for each third
Centralized Curriculum and Attendance Reporting
00:12:19
Speaker
-party app? or Are they tracking interim state?
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a really helpful question because I think the attendance marketing is is on Is on kind of live is on seminars and lectures. it i ah guess It's a helpful clarification It's not that I was present on the VLE doing a quiz It's that I was at a webinar at a seminar event asynchronous event. Yeah, so that's helpful clarification, I think So what have you seen Morgan? so You know, years ago, there was in in the k 12 space, and I'm blanking on the name of the product, but there was a really cool um k 12 product out of Scandinavia, I think it was Norway, but it had been adopted in large numbers of k 12 schools, that was a really nice dashboard, again, mostly for actually in class kind of situations where it showed all kinds of interesting analytics kind of stuff there.
00:13:14
Speaker
I mean, that was the best sort of instantiation of like an ecosystem of pulling all that different kind of things together. That's the most I've ever seen there, you know, mostly it really is it's it's a very siloed kind of world, you know, and occasionally you'll bring two or three things together, but um I don't see anybody having that holistic sense. Yeah.
00:13:36
Speaker
and And so I did a bunch of interviews or research as I was writing those posts, and each one I promised to do it on background. So I'm not going to try not to give any names here because we're dealing with the Department of Education. I didn't want them to get in trouble for speaking to me. But it was interesting because I did have several reactions from vendors saying, oh, yeah, we do that.
00:14:01
Speaker
And we do it for hundreds of schools. And then I would talk to them and say, OK, tell me more about what your solution is. And I guess ah one case, it was for clock hour programs. So it actually got into true what people normally think of as a tenant to what I believe I'm hearing from you, Neil, in the UK sense. that Quite often it was synchronous events.
00:14:25
Speaker
but it didn't really capture the tougher problem, which is asynchronous activities across a number of applications, and in particular, um this interim state.
00:14:37
Speaker
Can we back up a little? Can you talk about what the difference is between clock hour and other stuff? Because that's such a big part of the discussion right now in the US, and it's hard to actually make sense of what's going on. Oh, you're testing
Clock Hour vs Credit Hour Programs
00:14:50
Speaker
me. If I were writing a post on this, I'd be doing a lot of research to make sure I'm accurate. But the general idea is that when you're the definition of a course or a program,
00:15:00
Speaker
you can have programs that are defined by clop clock hours. So, cosmetology schools, which are also in the news, that's something where there's a lot more synchronous activity, and they're tracking true seat time, and quite often that gets into such as a vocational program. I'm actually doing a premise type of work I'm welding for 50 hours in order to get my certificate. Yes, and the judgment of the program really, truly is clock hour. Not in the sense that so much of higher education, you can trace the Carnegie units back to attendance taking for faculty 100 some years ago, but that's a quasi measurement. That's where what people essentially said, we assume for each course you're going to have
00:15:47
Speaker
three class sessions a week. And then for each class section, you'll have twice as much homework as you do class session. And that's the definition. That's where you get a lot of the 15-hour terms that we have in the U.S. But there's not actually measuring it that way. So most programs, certainly in the U.S., are credit hour based. It's based on the amount of work and does it map to a certain time assumption. But there's no tracking of the individual clock hours. So clock hour measurement and credit are very different in the state. Now I have to check. Did I get that right, Morgan? That's that's my understanding of it, yeah. But it's it's it's very confusing, yeah. Yeah. So going back to it, I heard a couple of vendors who said, oh, we solve it. But when you dig into it, it's like within this limited context.
00:16:38
Speaker
I also heard from a couple of schools saying we do it, and they all were highly centralized curriculum schools. So basically, well, that's not true. One of them is very strong academic technology unit, but not necessarily centralized curriculum.
00:16:56
Speaker
But the point is, these are ones where they can control the ecosystem. And so we keep bringing this up, like Neil, you even said not across the ecosystem. One of the challenges is, do you even know what all of your faculty are using for third party
Academic Freedom vs Institutional Constraints
00:17:11
Speaker
apps? Because LTI in particular, allows you to do fairly easy integrations and sometimes only the faculty or only the department they're in will know about it, but the institution doesn't have like a pre-approved list of all the apps in usage. In the U.S., if you're talking for-profit schools in particular and very highly centralized curriculum for a fully online program,
00:17:40
Speaker
you may have that constraint but that's a very small number of schools that do that. Yeah I think that's a really good point because I think I know in the UK that in general terms a lot of universities and kind of ed tech teams within universities have been really trying to grapple with a more unified approach to the to the tools that kind of sit within their ecosystem because they still find that faculty x has taken something on and then they're getting a query from a student about how they use this technology that they've not had any involvement in procuring or evaluating and that still happens to this day i think it's probably not as widespread as it is it used to be but you still have that and you know
00:18:26
Speaker
Just flipping it from the ed tech company side of things you know you see the startups trying to target the different faculties as well as a way in to the university so that complicates. This and you know makes it ah a challenge even if you did have a solution that would unify all of these things.
00:18:47
Speaker
And it triggers academic freedom, at least in the US. They have a very strong sense of academic freedom that faculty should be allowed to determine a lot more of what they're doing and not have constraints placed on them.
00:19:01
Speaker
And when you talk about, well, we need to know what all third-party apps are out there, I don't know how legitimate it is. I'm going to love to hear Morgan's reaction. But you do hear academic freedom brought up as a defense saying, hey, you can't predefine that these are the only apps we can use. So in the non-centralized curriculum world, it brings up academic freedom concerns here.
00:19:25
Speaker
A bit before morgan comes in I pocket academic freedom is a great card, isn't it? It's a great I wish I had the academic freedom card in life I just i'd be holding that up as as often as I could That's a great point So Morgan, I don't know how legitimate that is or what you've seen. Oh, first of all, let me just ask how legitimate of a pushback is that where faculty say hey, if you're trying to tell me what tools I can use, that violates academic freedom. Is that a legitimate complaint? As so as in, is it a real, is is it something, a complaint that is made or is it? does Yeah, more of the latter. Okay, yeah. Because remember, I come from an institution that where the the faculty, I spent time at an institution where the faculty insisted that they
00:20:15
Speaker
shouldn't be required to have a syllabus because that was a violation of their academic freedom. This was the same university that fired Steven Salida for his tweets. but That wasn't a violation of academic freedom.
Adopting New Educational Tools: Faculty Experiences
00:20:30
Speaker
I personally don't think it's i personally don't think it's a valid response. i think you know it's just I can understand why it happens. And it's frustrating. and I've got one particular friend that to this day still who's a faculty member who who complains to me because
00:20:50
Speaker
the university where we both used to work went with box instead of Dropbox. i remember bo yeah yeah You know, I understand that there are frustrations and and and things like that. and And once you get into particular kinds of things like a statistical piece of software or something, you know, it's a it's a tribal affiliation with your assess or an SPSS or an R user.
00:21:15
Speaker
But, you know, understanding the needs of students for a consistent environment and understanding the needs of support staff to actually so so support it, I think it's going to have to go and I don't think it's it's that much of a of a valid complaint anymore. It's not one that I have a lot of patience for, but it may be because of the scars of the past.
00:21:37
Speaker
yeah Well, I would argue, I think on the regulatory front, it is an issue because i I don't think that passing a regulation and forcing universities to change without thinking through what it would take. That's a real issue, even if that's the direction we're going longer term. I think there are other avenues to make change. I mean, the the past year, I mean, that's our frustration. We come at it from different, very different sides, but policy has been made. There's not good policy because it's been made badly.
00:22:07
Speaker
ye I think it's interesting just in terms of the drivers because there's definitely been an element of a greater focus on attendance monitoring over here because of mental health.
00:22:19
Speaker
challenges with students and you know that strikes me as a much more palatable driver for something that might add burden than oh we just I don't I don't know the exact drivers behind the education department over there for attendance but it doesn't seem to be you know quite as palatable a motive I guess ah a driver to kind to kind of do this kind of thing you know But that that that attendance monitoring, because of you know things that have happened and mental health challenges, I think that's that's been seen as a just a good way of checking that students are okay, which you know feels feels like a better ah better direction and than just yeah adding burden.
00:23:03
Speaker
Well, I did promise that we're not going to get into the regulatory angle. So this is one of the few times that I'm the one pulling back. All right. Let's forget about regulations for right now and even policy, but let's just stick with this. So we don't know a whole lot from a holistic view of students and what they're doing, particularly with asynchronous activity across multiple platforms.
00:23:27
Speaker
And it's sort of interesting that that's the case. I mean, because so much of the talk is everything's being tracked, but we're doing a, if that's the goal, we're doing a pretty poor job of it. Another thing that I got is some of the pushback I got in private was I mentioned Caliper, which is a federated data standard or framework also being developed by one ed tech, a same group that did on the LTI standard.
Challenges with Caliper Standard for Data
00:23:58
Speaker
and it's federated. So the idea is that if you get adoption on each of the platforms, they can publish their activity. It's not a matter of everything is in a hub and spoke, send it back to the LMS. It's you could just publish activity for multiple platforms and then another application could gather them in for multiple sources. So theoretically, Caliper for more accurately, a federated data approach could be a solution to this, actually getting data from multiple sources. What was interesting on the pushback is I was trying to make a point that there's ah there's something that's in proof of concept stage that's an extension to the original standard.
00:24:45
Speaker
that's being looked at, but it's nowhere near complete and we don't know where the results are going to be. But I did get ah some pushback there where people say calipers real calipers out there. But then in the same breath, one of the big things that were was acknowledged, it's not getting adopted. Very few vendors are actually adopting caliper and publishing data.
00:25:10
Speaker
that you're also not getting third-party apps that will collect data from multiple applications to provide a holistic view. So not trying to trash the standard in any way, but there's a real adoption issue of that even when we come up with standards that are going down the path of answering this analytics type of question, it's just not happening.
00:25:32
Speaker
And one of the things I heard, I don't think this is a primary reason, two things I heard. One was the fact of it sort of goes against business models occasionally. So if your data, no, my business model is to monetize this data and give predictions, whatever it is, then I'm disincentivized to just publish that data and let other people do what they will with it.
00:25:54
Speaker
And that was it. There was also a case where I talked to somebody who was gathering data from through Caliper ah from an LMS VLE company, but then they also did it with a with a public API that the vendor produced. And they said the data was just better outside of Caliper. So I guess my thing is I'm just pointing out that Caliper has disappointed it so has not solved the problem. Some is might be quality. There's no guarantee that every event is going to be published or consumed. That's just part of the standard. But adoption is the bigger issue. It's just not widely adopted.
00:26:36
Speaker
Now, Caliper's not the only thing. There's also XAPI, which has been around longer for a federated data thing. But neither of those is, at least that I'm aware of, widely adopted. So again, let me check with ah Neil, because things might be different in the UK and Europe. Are you seeing XAPI or Caliper being adopted over there to give a holistic view? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you mentioned the word holistic, because I think I've definitely sort of heard of examples of things like learning record stores and you know there's things like yeah what used to be called learning locker by learning pool being used. My impression is that you know there's not necessarily holistic usage and it's not holistic across the board. I just i struggle to see and hit ah and come across institutions that are
00:27:32
Speaker
you know looking at looking at this there might be kind of specific projects or specific courses that are being funded where these things might be drawn upon or particular projects where learning technologists might get involved in this type of thing and drawing in data from different sources and kind of reporting on that but it just strikes me that it's all a little bit piecemeal in terms of institutions. That's kind of my general sense of the kind of overall picture over here. But I guess it is interesting in the sense of, you know, maybe maybe it is going to take a kind of a heavy handed policy initiative to change change things because if
00:28:18
Speaker
you know a vendor can preach about the benefits of data and their dashboards and all of the things that are reported within their products. But it's not clear that the kind of behavior of instructors is kind of it has has changed or that they're particularly but they particularly find that appealing or valuable.
Policies Driving Data Collection and Analytics
00:28:40
Speaker
And maybe that's partly to do with the product as well. So you know maybe maybe it might take something like a policy measure to to to kind of force people down this route and hopefully derive benefits from it.
00:28:54
Speaker
Well, I think there's, there's federal policy, but there's also institutional policy if to look at it that way, where I was the most convinced in this research that the people were getting closer to having this holistic view. It was with schools that had a lot of central resources and they're purchasing policy. We're not going to sign a contract and give you money unless you provide us your data.
00:29:21
Speaker
through some sort of data export or API. And then the school takes all that, puts it in a data lake, and does their own combination. So I did talk to a few places where that problem had been solved for that school, or it was getting pretty close to being solved.
00:29:38
Speaker
But the car it was an institutional policy that was driving it, and it relied on a lot of central resources to to make it happen. Because really, you're going to separate APIs or individual data exports for every approved vendor and pulling them together. That's where I saw the most progress.
00:29:59
Speaker
There is one area in which Caliper and xAPI are alive and well and vibrant and that's in LMS RFPs.
00:30:11
Speaker
um I'll take that plus the academic freedom card is my two big takeaways from this podcast episode. because you run into them all the time. Whether they actually translate into any action, I'm convinced they don't. And I'm always amazed also just on the same topic of data and RFPs, the number of times that OAI PMH shows up in RFPs as well. Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
Well, and one thing I'll be interested is we got new leadership at one EdTech. Curtis Barnes is ah is now the CEO. Michael Feldstein just took a job as chief strategy officer
Potential Leadership Changes and Data Standard Adoption
00:30:49
Speaker
over there. And I know Michael's been deeply involved in the standards and has a very, in my mind, a very practical impact. Like it's not a standard from a standards case. You got to have it adopted. and Why is that?
00:31:02
Speaker
So I think OneEdTech's done some fabulous work. LTI has changed the whole ecosystem. However, we're in a new era of one ed tech. And i one thing I think that's one thing we need to track is will there be a renewed emphasis on the federated data side to get actual adoption or you know something that makes progress towards this more holistic view, not 100% holistic, but at least a more holistic view of student activity. um So I'm certainly looking at that.
00:31:37
Speaker
I'm certainly hopeful about the new direction of of one in tech. I think it's going to make all the difference because I think there were some problems before. I do worry about the something that you mentioned that I don't want us to lose, which is the the business model. You know, companies have that data as their own data. And I think that's a very powerful thing and it shouldn't be underestimated. Well, i but let me put you on the spot just like I did with faculty and academic freedom. How legitimate and Morgan's opinion is that for a company to say, hey, our business model, we don't want to give out this data because we want to monetize it and we don't want to send it out. How legitimate is that putting you on the spot? I can see why they do it because, you know, data is the new soil or the new oil or whatever, you know, there's real value in data. And I'm also I'm currently reading The Everything War, the book about ah but Amazon. So I'm coming at this from a very um
00:32:36
Speaker
jaded perspective. um you know I think universities and colleges need to play tough and say, look, okay, it may be your business model, but it's also our business model. And we're not going to buy it from you unless you give us the data. And and I think it's going to be a tough It's going to be a tough and and unfortunately, it's going to be a tough one for those to win because a lot of them are not educated enough to just to to make that argument. um Universities, I'm often shocked at how they approach contracts. They're just like, oh, OK, there you go. Well, they go through really long checklists and stuff, but none of it or very little of it is actually strategic in their interest.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yeah, my friends are are sick of me actually whining at them like don't sign contracts without having me have a look at it. like Well, you are a little bit obsessive in a very good way about that. So that might they're taking advantage of you in a good way. Most most of Phil and I's interaction outside of the podcast consists of him saying you're obsessive compulsive and my saying you're obsessive compulsive. The different way yeah we have a support group going up.
00:33:45
Speaker
So um let's take the implications of what we're talking about in this past five or 10 minutes.
Data Usage Disparities in Institutions
00:33:51
Speaker
What we're saying, and I don't want to put words in your mouth and you guys can view it a different way, from my perspective, what we're pointing out is the most realistic way to address this problem of more holistic views of student learning activity, organized around the learner, and not just grades and they signed on, is happening at the institution level.
00:34:15
Speaker
And yes, as Neil was saying, policy can drive some changes. I'm seeing school level policy having a much bigger impact at this point, and it's coming from the bigger institutions. And the implication of this is the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. It's going to be our larger, more centralized institutions who are already are making real progress in this area.
00:34:42
Speaker
and seeing where learning analytics can take us and the smaller or the highly decentralized schools are just, this might sound harsh, they're sort of along for the ride and they're not making progress or they're it's up to other people to address this problem. That's my view of one of the implications. I don't know if that's good or bad, but ah what's what's your view on this?
00:35:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it's interesting that you highlight the decentralized institutions. ah I just increasingly feel like the federated sort of system of universities is increasingly incongruent with the modern world and elements of technology and I'm sure that plenty of people would provide arguments against that and would want to protect that model. I just find that model, and I think this is an example of where that model presents challenges in terms of implementing things like learning analytics for the benefit of students and staff across the board. And I think it's one of the reasons why implementation isn't, you know, a big ah widespread
00:35:53
Speaker
thing and it's why those universities who have more of a centralized approach can utilize these things and I think in a way we're talking about well one of the drivers for this conversation is how do you record attendance across ah this edtech ecosystem but another way of looking at it is institutions are not deriving benefits from from learning analytics, essentially, from understanding student activity in the digital realm. um So you know it's not just about solving a particular policy problem, policy-driven problem. It's actually universities are missing something. And I think in a UK context where money is very tight, you know I was chatting to someone the other day around the amount of money that institutions lose because of because of student dropouts.
00:36:43
Speaker
And learning analytics is not the silver bullet for that, but it's part of a solution that can help address that. So you know it's not just it's not just how do we solve this particular policy-driven problem. It's that, you know to your point around the rich getting richer, that if if institutions aren't effectively implementing and utilizing this stuff, then they're potentially a disadvantage from those that are. I wonder whether part of the problem also is that just looking at learning analytics, particularly in the US, learning analytics is so backwards focused and so student characteristic focus. So it's pulling data from the SIS rather than the LMS or from things. So we've, we've focused on that model of like, what, what is your socioeconomic background? You know, what is your, your incoming GPA? Whereas I think the UK is in a better spot where
00:37:39
Speaker
Learning analytics has been far more focused on current activities and you mentioned stream ah You know, that's an example of that. Whereas in the u.s. It's all that sis data. Yeah I will say I think you're exactly right in this area talking about ah incongruent with the modern world. So one way to view it is even if you don't pass a judgment on, it's better that they're going this way. We're saying the external environment and the direction of the modern world is going this way. And over time, decentralized institutions are just going to have more and more and more difficulty dealing with that external environment.
Decentralized Education System and Data Practices
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you know one of the big discussions in the UK because of the state of universities finances are things like shared services and although I don't think this necessarily speaks to universities sharing services across the board if you think about a critique of of of a kind of decentralized model and say for instance you had implementations at school level then you you know that is ah potentially another manifestation of a kind of duplication of effort
00:38:54
Speaker
as well, which you know but you know is is is bad in terms of the kind of cost side of things. So you know I think that's another argument for a more kind of centralized approach to these things. ah Conversely, and i'll Morgan is fond of saying, or I'm fond of hearing her talk about one of the strengths of the US education system is just how varied it is, how many different models, different sectors, different styles. So our US education system itself is highly decentralized. So there's an argument saying, yeah, they might be incongruent with the direction of the modern world, but there's also a lament of, hey, we're going to lose some of our vibrancy that comes from the decentralized system and the very and the highly variable nature of education.
00:39:44
Speaker
So that's a downside doesn't mean it's not going to happen but um am I reading you correctly yeah although i I think within that variation you can have some degree of centralization or or sort of.
00:39:58
Speaker
you know, even within, say, a community college system, because where I see the diversity is, you know, you've got community colleges and different kinds of so much more variety and in the kinds of providers, but within those providers, I think you can have some small centrality. Do you suppose that individual providers could actually make the argument, hey, you know, Joe, instructor or or student,
00:40:19
Speaker
you know You're always saying how you want us to be more like an Amazon or something like that. What they're doing is providing you a better interface driven by data. So allow us to be consistent and to provide you with that with that data as a way of your interface being better. i will I have trouble with that because I would say that faculty being ah just the fact that you're trying to argue data is going to by default turn off most faculty.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, see, corporatization of education. Morgan's the one who's behind it. I always knew it. You know, yeah I don't see it as a strong argument. It doesn't mean that it's a wrong argument, but from a change management perspective, I think there's some challenges. I wonder as well, guys, what you think about, you know, you kind of talked about maybe academics disposition or lack of a disposition to kind of do this kind of thing. But I also wonder to what extent do faculty just look at what's the implementations of learning analytics, the kind of options that they have and just think these aren't very good. yeah These aren't useful to me. you know I just wonder whether you've kind of picked up on any of that as well.
00:41:32
Speaker
Well, I would argue that the whole history of the LMS VLE where it used to be a walled garden and that was sort of an approach of this is what you should use. And then faculty members had the view that you're saying these aren't very good. There's bloated systems. They don't have good tools. I can get a better tool using A blogger, I mean, I'm going back in time here, but you know I can find something better. And quite honestly, a lot of them were. A lot of that led to, we're sort of circling back here, the whole LTI movement. We need more of an ecosystem approach. Long-winded way to say, yes, I think that is a factor that's at play.
00:42:12
Speaker
But I would also argue the world's different than it was back in the 2000s. I mean, there is increased demand for this. And as you said, student retention and Morgan's written about this very strongly lately. We've got to focus more on student retention and success, not just getting them in the door.
00:42:32
Speaker
And we know, quoting you, that data has got a role analytics has a role to play in this. So i the movement is going to increase that, yes, but we have to address the bigger problem, and we've got to find ways to do it. And part of that's got to include federated data, a holistic view of students. So I do think this, even though I've written about problems with the federal policy, I think this is a trend that we're going to continue to grapple with in education across the world. It's sort of the way I would wrap this up, but it's a little bit surprising how little progress has been made in general, despite all the talk about that.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, I just had to add that it's encouraging that it's not just in the UK that the regulators adding regulatory burden to universities at a time when they don't really need it. So it's, you know, it's encouraging that it's not just us. That's something to i will put our Department of Education against your office for students any day. Yeah, that'd be a good battle.
00:43:37
Speaker
Hey, well, um it's been a great conversation, a a little bit different style for us, but I love diving deeper into this topic and it's enjoyed this first season of the podcast. So I thank both of you very much for making this happen and we got to see what the but the second season brings us. But thanks for all of our listeners and thanks to Neil and Morgan for the conversation.