2 November 2016 — Education Intelligence Update

Hi all

Welcome to Issue #3 of the fortnightly intelligence. As ever please do get in touch if you have any queries, suggestions or indeed critiques and do forward on if you think others might enjoy it.

I’ll also be sending out a small survey in the next edition.

All views expressed in these reports are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of FutureLearn.

The big stories

• Edtech tools are making slow but scalable headway on assessments and student support
• Silicon Valley and academia square off on the nature and solution to the skills gap crisis
• University faculty in the US are most sceptical of Edtech but may be fighting a losing battle against consumer preferences and market forces

MOOCS

Coursera updates its platform to incentivise completion and project-based learning

• Coursera have a new ‘Progress’ page that they proudly claim it takes its inspiration from fitness apps and — thrillingly — financial planning tools. One notable feature is the ‘next step prompt’ which displays a snippet of the next step on a course to entice the learner back in — here
• Coursera to allow all courses within a specialization — not just the final course — to use projects. Coursera didn’t provide a rationale but we can conclude that as with Udacity it was in part a way to increase the credibility of the course. Learners and employers alike can benefit from tangible proof of their knowledge and skills through projects such as designing an app — increasing the proof should help them monetise further
• The expansion of projects should precipitate the natural corollary — eportfolios. The question is whether Coursera will use this to stick with their current monetisation strategy i.e. per course/Specialization or use it to launch a premium user option — here

Udacity — Education-as-a-service — In an interview with Credit Suisse, Sebastian Thrun — Chairman of Udacity revealed some insights into Udacity (Thrun sits on the board and is helping them to develop FinTech).

• Udacity have a 90% completion rate on their courses, this is high but not surprising as they charge around $200 p/m to to their users
• Udacity see themselves as “education as a service” rather than a product. Thrun argues simply providing content would be a product but their mentorship scheme and reviewers make it a service. The distinction is salient both as a USP vs MOOCs (who don’t offer services such as mentors) and to the fundamentally different monetisation strategy — services are subscription, products are purchased

What XuetangX’s success tells us about education in the middle kingdom

In an interview with Class-Central Deputy Secretary General of Tsinghua University shed some light on the successes and ambitions of Tsinghua University’s MOOC platform. The

• They are the dominant MOOC platform in China — The most astounding revelation was that XuetangX has 5m users. For reference, Coursera their likely nearest rival stated their second largest demographic after the US was India with 1.7m, given XuetangX 3x the number of Chinese users. Furthermore XuetangX is scaling up with 130 staff to date and plans to scale to 200 by the year end — here
• It’s not all about STEM — Although STEM is a priority for China, the top courses at Tsinghua mirror the diversity seen on other platforms like Coursera. Conversational English was the most popular (2.77m), Financial analysis and decision making (2.53m), Introduction to psychology (2.4m), China History (1.2m), Data structures and algorithm design (1.1), Basic C++ (1m), History of Chinese Architecture (1m)
• XuetangX’s success may point to importance of localisation and being home grown — Coursera in particular has made serious efforts to court China and their CEO Rick Levin has a strong connection. Although successful (over 1 m Chinese users on Coursera) Mandarin may well have proved a differentiator
• The necessity of roots in China — Coursera had to partner with local media providers in order ensure their web content wasn’t throttled. XuetangX may well find it easier to offer their services. Furthermore, Tsinghua as a an elite domestic brand may well be worth more to Chinese users than even a foreign university

edX adds news partners: University of Edinburgh (Oct), Ural Federal University (Oct) and the University of Newcastle (Australia) (Sept)

Edtech

Where the teachers can’t go — A slew of new Edtech tools may be the precursor to automating larger aspects of education.

Technologies tend to be transformative not at the point they effectively imitate existing processes but the point at which they change the processes themselves. The scale, convenience, cost-saving and eventually accuracy of several online tools hints at this change.

• Machine Learning (ML) assessment — Kadenze founders announced they’ve developed several automated marking tools that can automate marking of the simpler aspects music composition e.g. the structure of a composition (by analysing sounds and patterns to determine the start and end). They argue the machine learning assessment is as good as a human, scales, and doesn’t get hangovers. Kadenze are optimistic their tool will progress quickly to photos, videos and given ML can already create music it may not be far away from qualitative judgements -here
• AI learning assistants — Pearson have teamed up with IBM’s Watson Learning for specific courses. Watson will read the course, offer tips and based on other student queries and problems progressively improve its response by measuring the effectiveness of its advice — here
• Adaptive Learning — McGraw Hill talked up their adaptive learning system — noting it allows students to fail faster, in a safe environment and receive tailored feedback immediately, on-demand — here
• Chatbots — Colorado State University among others are looking to Livechat (i.e. pop up chats you get on some product sites) and Chatbots that ask scripted questions. How effective they are is important but their scaling capacity makes them a compelling proposition — here

Two surveys highlight tension in academia over the use of technology

Data: Inside Higher Ed’s Faculty and Administrators Attitudes on Technology conducted with Gallup has 1,671 responses across US Higher Education Institutions here. The second was by McGraw-Hill an education publisher of 3,311 college students here

• Administrators are positive about the role of technology: 63% of administrators believed online courses can achieve the same student outcomes as face to face and 84% of them believed the attributed improvements from Edtech justified the investment
• Students heartily endorse technology: 81% students of students believed Edtech improved their grades, 61% (up from 56% last year) preferred to use Edtech in their learning — online discussions and videos were cited as the most used
• Faculty express far more scepticism: 55% faculty did not believe online courses had the same outcomes as face to face in general but believed they could at their institution. Separately 79% faculty who had taught online courses said the experience had improved their online teaching and better use digital in their classrooms

Faculty scepticism is unlikely to stem the tide as student preference for technology in education is growing and anxious administrators will be keen to appease student preferences to ensure their university remains attractive.

Virtual Reality makes its way to the classroom but transformation may be someway off — Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has created a free VR tool that allows students to visualise how climate change will drive ocean acidification.

The move is timely as VR is set to enter the consumer market proper this year with Oculus rift (March) Google’s Daydream View and Sony’s Playstation VR (Oct). VR will undoubtedly grow as an education tool as VR ownership expands, yet initially it is probably more accurate to view it like educative gaming experience such as Minecraft. To be transformative it’ll need to move beyond gaming and into a communication tool to compete with the likes of Skype. That’ll enable true virtual classrooms and immersive experiences — here

Education leaders desperate to improve student outcomes but differ on what that means — An Eduventures survey of 200 Higher Education Institutions in the US cite ‘retention to graduation’ as their top metric, followed by ‘transformative learning experience’ other top metrics include career fulfilment and student satisfaction — here

Blackboard release analytics data on how their platform is used by students — Blackboard’s data science team released usage stats on their platform.

• Viewing grades is the best indicator of student success: The frequency with which a student viewed their grades was the single best indicator (more than time spent on course material, assignments etc) of a student’s success
• Spending too long on content is a red flag — content was the most used feature, but students who accessed content for longer than the median time tended to get lower grades — perhaps because they were struggling with the content
• Speed of assessments was correlated with confidence — Faster assessments were associated with higher grades
• Blackboard’s team note even where the findings aren’t causal they can be useful for educators as predictive analytics — here

Most academics are unsure of how open source licensing works but make their data open anyway — report by Figshare — here

Edtech Finance

Venture Capitalist (including Edtech) Peter Thiel backs Trump and draws fire — Peter Thiel has made a $1.25m donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — the effect of which is causing some companies and groups in Silicon Valley to disassociate themselves from him and his companies (here). Watters argues it matters given that Thiel’s role as a prominent Edtech investor will be shaping how the sector develops and likely as not it will be in line with his views — here

Pearson shares decline on the back of poor US sales — Pearson have been undergoing a long restructuring of their business with an aim to be the ‘Netflix of education’ (here)

OPM (Online Programme Management)

2U’s market beating profits keep optimism in online programmes buoyant — 2U, the online programme management company beat market predictions with quarterly profits of $0.09 per share. 2U is relatively new and publicly listed and so many use it as a barometer for the health of the online programme market. 2U’s rapid rise to profitability and signing of new deals such as Daytona (here) — in an industry where high upfront capital costs prevail — is likely to be taken as proof of the market’s health.

Do Online Programmes make the education market more efficient? This was the question behind a recent economics paper. The question is critical in the US as the debate around how to provide affordable tertiary education rages on. The authors’ hypothesis was that in areas underserved by universities or colleges — providers would have more price-setting power (as they’d be the only providers — e.g. a monopoly) which would make education more expensive. As an online program is by definition omnipresent it should provide an alternative option for learners and thus and push prices down.

• The paper found that less selective private colleges did see a fall in enrolment but that prices had not dropped. The authors concluded pricing was subject to a number of factors so may not be detectable
• Competition — including online — is a hot topic in the debate around the future of US Higher Ed and it is critical to assess to what extent increasing supply — including online will be part of the solution for more affordable education — here

The LMS market goes through a period of consolidation — edutechnica argues the LMS market is consolidating with some companies dropping out (Pearson) and legacy systems being rapidly retired. Kroner, the author, argues this could mean improved customer service and better third party interoperability especially iOS and Android integration as they’ll stop being in an endless arms race to add new features — here

Universities at forefront of new industrial wave as demand for 3D printers surge — 3D printers sales are projected to rise from 200K to 400K in 2016 with universities fuelling much of the demand. 3D printers have widespread application in engineering and health tech departments as well as consumer entrepreneurs, as they allow advance manufacturing and prototyping with many experts and indeed governments seeing them as heralding a new industrial revolution. Either way, their novelty and the growing demand make them an attractive target for MOOCs — here and here

Moodle develops offline functionality for its mobile app — The popular open source LMS has allowed users of their app to: View grades, participate in activities and gain notifications offline — here

Hobsons merge 2 acquisitions to make 1 new product — PAR Framework and Starfish Retention Solutions now form Hobson’s creatively named “Starfish Enterprise Success Platform”. The new student analytics service will offer a dashboard with intervention options — here

Blackboard partners with Dropbox for file-sharing collaboration — 6K universities already use Dropbox for their students — here

UKHE (UK Higher Education)

Brexit updates

• Including students in immigration is a mistake says Aston’s new VC — New Vice-Chancellor of Aston University, Alex Cameron argues Australia went through a similar phase of hostile rhetoric towards international students and latterly had to reverse both its rhetoric and the process of counting international students as immigrants as it sought to expand its HE sector — here
• The timing is opportune as a new survey (commissioned by Universities UK — a UKHE lobbying group) showed that 75% of people in the UK think international students should not count as part of the net migration figure and 91% believe they should be able to stay after their studies and work. This was further supported by a The Times (London) revealing the Home Office’s own figures showed only 1% of international students overstay — around 1,500 — far shy of the government’s ‘thousands’ -here
• Head of HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) says academics are already turning down UK positions due to Brexit. This is likely due to uncertainty over how visas and research funding will work post-Brexit — here
• What role should universities play in May’s fairer society? Daisy Hooper, Senior Programmes and Policy Officer at Universities Alliance (a network of universities, including the OU) argues the government should focus less on getting more poor students into elite universities and more on broadening access (including through apprenticeships) to all students. Hooper argues the focus on elite universities treats education as a ‘positional good’ i.e. one which confers a rank. This would be logical if students only aimed to compete in the UK as getting more poorer students to elite universities would increase social mobility, however UK students also exist in a global labour market and will be aided by the skills and the brand that a UK education confers — here

International Education

Mind the [skills] gap

As Eric Schmidt announced in his LSE lecture that the UK needed 10,000 computer scientists in academia(here) to train the army needed in the workforce he was returning to a familiar anxiety across western governments — the skills gap. This report looks at two takes on the skills gap with contrasting views of the diagnosis and medicine for this affliction.

The first is by Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist (including Edtech) in Silicon Valley who launched a critique of the US Higher Education system. Khosla’s argument is essentially- that the future of work will require more STEM skills but that the ‘liberal arts’ rather than STEM are the preferred default option for most american students — this needs to be changed. For Khosla the liberal arts are a ‘nice to have’ that can be developed later in life and he proposes the ‘liberal sciences’ a mixture of physical sciences, statistics, economics and psychology as a new default blended degree. For Khosla, the litmus test of the graduate of the future would be to read, understand and critique the Economist magazine cover to cover, be able to explain Trump and even the Kardashians.

By contrast, Beyond the Skills Gap by Ross Benbow and Matthew Hora of the University of Wisconsin seeks to reject such a narrowly defined approach. By examining how companies employ graduates, labour market data and following up with company interviews they argue that ‘knowledge gaps’ i.e. where the graduate lacks the specific knowledge, only explain part of the problem companies have in hiring employees. They note that the vast majority of science graduates don’t enter related industries but more problematically when they do — they often still lack key soft skills such as: self-directed learning, problem solving, team-work and a ‘solid work ethic’. Active cultivation of these rather than simply increasing STEM graduates is where HE should focus.

Both arguments have their merits but Khosla’s lack of evidence or citation thereof gives his the air of being a Silicon Valley dinner conversation rather than an evidenced based critique — Here and here

Business courses remain extremely popular but who takes them, when and why differs significantly

• DrEducation provides a simple demographic breakdown of the two major international groups in the US. ⅕ of international students study Business in the US of which Chinese tend to study it an an undergraduate while Indians prefer to study a masters in business (not an MBA though) — here
• More women take MBAs and do so in part to reenter the workforce — CarringtonCrisp — a Higher Education consultancy — commissioned a survey on MBA students. The report found more women were considering MBAs (42% up from previous high of 38%) and that a key motivation for women was reentry into the workforce after pregnancy
• The survey also found 26% of respondents said they’d prefer blended or entirely online. Noting the difference CarringtonCrisp suggest tailoring market and delivery methods to the different motivations. The results are good news for online platforms such as FutureLearn with a female majority and could well help meet this demand- here

UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) pivots to Higher Education — DFID are making £40–50m open to tender to organisations that can affect ‘systemic change’ in HE in fragile/conflict countries. DFID’s focus on systemic change hints at a flexibility in approaches that’ll go beyond funding university to university partnerships and could embrace more innovative solutions. This could be an opening for digital solutions which could include MOOCs subject to connectivity. DFID is renowned as a pioneer of development policies — here

Could bilingual learning soon be in vogue in the anglosphere? California prop 58 reconsiders bilingual education. At first the proposition — expected to pass — seems of little relevance to the world of Edtech. Californians will vote on whether schools are allowed to teach in more than one language (with Spanish the most popular alternative). California banned bilingual schools in 1998 because the evidence appeared to show bilingual children progressed slower. Now that the evidence appears to show bilingualism as an advantage (here), it’s back on the ballot.

Although this may remain a localised issue, California’s prominence as a policy pioneer in the US and as home to silicon valley could see bilingualism gain ground and Edtech may well follow. It is notable that many countries whose students master second language do so when they learn another subject in the language.- here

US HE roundup

• Trump elaborates on his Higher Education policy- and academics are divided over whether it’s to the left of Obama or to the right of the Republican party. The centrepiece is income-linked repayment with a cap at 12.5% with a cap after 15 years (nominally to the left of Obama) but the loans themselves will be offered based on the market demand for the degree (to the right of the republicans). Regardless, this could be academic by November 8 — here
• Senator Bernie Sanders could be in line to take over the Senate committee on Health and Education- this would be positive for Hillary’s plan — here
• Taiwan aims to attract 30K additional international students by 2019 — here

A little extra to read (if the above did not satiate you)

WonkHE have provided an excellent visual guide to the TEF — here

Neuroscientist at the Harvard School of Education Todd Rose argues the average brain doesn’t exist and that as scientists unpack the implications in learning it’ll spend the end of ‘standard’ for textbooks, classes and learning — here