As I outlined recently in my “e-Literate’s Changing Themes for Changing Times” post, I am shifting my coverage somewhat. I’ll be developing and calling out tags I use for these themes so that you can go to an archive page on each one. This one will be listed under the “AI/ML” “third-wave EdTech,” and “future of work” tags. I’ve been fascinated by the rapid progression of ChatGPT article fads: Look at this weird thing that writes stuff! I asked ChatGPT a question—and here’s what it answered!! I asked ChatGPT to write this article—and it totally did!!! Students could use ChatGPT to student es ..read more

As I outlined recently in my “e-Literate’s Changing Themes for Changing Times” post, I am shifting my coverage somewhat. I’ll be developing and calling out tags I use for these themes so that you can go to an archive page on each one. This one will be listed under the “changing enrollment” tag. Just before Christmas, The New York Times published an ostensibly feel-good story about a Syrian refugee who built a massively successful chocolate business in Canada. But the story buries the lede. The company’s CEO could have—and should have—been a doctor. He couldn’t get credit for his prior educat ..read more

I’ll be facilitating a webinar on Competency-Based Education (CBE) next Thursday as the culmination of a three-part series about the changing higher education landscape hosted by Open LMS. The first webinar was about the connections between higher ed and workforce learning. The second was about international education. In this third webinar, we’ll be talking about how support for CBE ties in to the prior two webinar themes. CBE can be a very useful tool for colleges and universities to reach students that they often have trouble reaching. I’ll be publishing a longer post about this connection ..read more

As with much of the venture capital world, EdTech venture funding has slowed to a trickle overall and is almost completely frozen in some areas, such as early-stage investments. Conventional wisdom seems to be that this state of affairs won’t last forever. Since the proximate causes of the situation are falling stock prices and high inflation, the investing environment should improve significantly during 2023 as inflation falls and the stock market begins to recover. Unfortunately, this may be an oversimplification. Longer-term changes in the markets may cause lasting damage to the kinds of pr ..read more

As I outlined recently in my “e-Literate’s Changing Themes for Changing Times” post, I am shifting my coverage somewhat. I’ll be developing and calling out tags I use for these themes so that you can go to an archive page on each one. This one will be listed under the “AI/ML” “third-wave EdTech,” and “future of work” tags. ChatGPT is creating all kinds of buzz about students cheating on essays. So it got me thinking. If I had had access to a tool like ChatGPT when I was in college, would I have used it to cheat? “A robot writing an essay” as interpreted by DALL-E 2 Yes. Absolutely. One hundr ..read more

When I talked to my friends at Open LMS about facilitating a webinar series, they gave me a lot of latitude to explore the aspects of their business that I find interesting, unusual, and valuable. The angle that caught my attention immediately is that, due to their Moodle heritage, they bridge a lot of silos. Which means that their user community bridges a lot of silos. Which, in turn, means that their user conferences, the first of which they are planning right now, present unusual opportunities to foster conversations among folks that normally aren’t in the same room together. What should th ..read more

I often find when I’m writing about the challenges or dysfunctions of a situation that I struggle to communicate about the dysfunction itself without making my words feel personal to the people who are in the middle of it. I try to write about problems and challenges clearly enough to make them easier to tackle. As a result, my prose has sharp edges. Sometimes those edges cut when I don’t intend them to. While I haven’t yet received any negative feedback on my recent VC culture post, some of the positive comments have seemed a bit off from what I intended to communicate. The main point of that ..read more

I have learned, and continue to learn, many lessons from our two years of trying to get Argos Education to escape velocity. Learning from failure—especially painful failure—is a process. I expect to write a number of pieces over time as I sort through my experience and get a little distance from it. The most immediate piece that I feel able to write about today is dealing with venture capitalists. Obviously, I can’t tell you all the secrets to success since we didn’t succeed. I can only tell you some things that I wish I knew sooner. The core lesson of today’s post is that you’ll stay saner if ..read more

As I outlined recently in my “e-Literate’s Changing Themes for Changing Times” post, I am shifting my coverage somewhat. I’ll be developing and calling out tags I use for these themes so that you can go to an archive page on each one. This one will be listed under the “changing enrollment” and “third-wave EdTech” tags. Phil Hill recently tweeted out two slides from Coursera’s quarterly conference call. They made me sit up straight. Then they made me read the transcript from the call. I haven’t been paying enough attention. Having watched the rise of the MOOCs closely and having watched 2U/Ed ..read more

As the first of a three-part series, I’ll be facilitating a webinar sponsored by OpenLMS on university/workplace partnerships on Wednesday, November 2nd at 1 PM EDT. Register here. I’m excited about this series for a few reasons. First, it fits well with my new themes for e-Literate. Second, I really like and respect the OpenLMS folks, so that will make the conversations more interesting and fun. And third, for those of you that don’t know OpenLMS, it has an interesting Moodle story. I know Moodle has dropped off the radar in many US colleges and universities but it continues to thrive and evo ..read more