Cultural artifact: Tonight’s class homework is to go register an account with Khan Academy and add your teacher as a coach. But what if they want a different coach? Easily done.

Khan thought he could offer teachers crucial new insight into how students learn. He envisioned a dashboard system that would track students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they’d watched, how many questions they’d answered, and which ones they’d gotten wrong or right. Normally, of course, teachers fly blind. They use quizzes, homework, and their own observations to try to figure out how much their students understand, but it’s a crude process. Day to day, it’s hard to know what a student is and isn’t learning. A dashboard, Khan says, can change all that.

[...]

Cadwell has already gotten so used to these metrics that she feels unmoored in her other classes, where they’re not yet using the system. “In those, I get to a quiz or a test and I’m blindsided when they don’t know something—or when they ace something.”

[...]

But by being able to target her students for special help exactly when they needed it, Cadwell saw stunning results: The class’s test scores improved more than 106 percent in half a year. One girl I met in the classroom had advanced an astonishing 366 percent. “I hated math,” the girl tells me cheerfully. “But now it’s actually fun.” She began the year unable to do basic fractions; during my visit, I watched her plow through complicated long division, carefully working problems on the Khan software.

How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education. Whether or not the Khan Academy ultimately succeeds, the trend is very real.

PS: I took the blog post down after NYU received a “cease and desist” letter, and I was advised by my superiors that I may be liable for legal liabilities if I keep the post up. They could not perform a full legal analysis, and as a precaution they asked me to take the post down. For work-related issues, the employer has the right to restrict “free speech”, a ruling supported by many decisions of the Supreme Court. It made no sense for me to disobey and try to fight the C&D letter by myself.

Panos Ipeirotis — Comment on Business Insider’s “NYU Professor Catches 20% Of His Students Cheating, And He’s The One Who Pays For It“ and related to this previous note. I wish we knew more about the thinking within NYU’s administration. Isn’t this what universities are supposed to stand for?

In other words, my theory is: Cheating (on a systematic level) happens because students try to get an edge over their peers/competitors. Even top-notch students cheat, in order to ensure a perfect grade. Fighting cheating is not something that professors can do well in the long run, and it is counterproductive by itself. By channeling this competitive energy into creative activities, in which you cannot cheat, everyone is better off.

Panos Ipeirotis — Why I will never pursue cheating again. A computer scientist teaching in a business school details a year of trying to combat cheating on assignments. Overall, he spent 45 hours addressing the problem during a 32 hour lecture course, and 22 of 108 enrolled students admitted cheating. Solutions could include:

• Public projects – All of the work ends up public, so embarrassment is the deterring factor.
• Peer review – Students have to present their work in class, and are judged by others.
• Competitions – Grades are performance-based (e.g. students build websites to attract the greatest number of unique visitors).

Takeaway: If plagiarism is your biggest worry, you’re doing it wrong.

The success of these online competitors and the crisis among many of higher education’s traditional institutions are far from unique. These are familiar steps in a process known as “disruptive innovation” that has occurred in many industries, from accounting and music to communications and computers. It is the process by which products and services that were once so expensive, complicated, inaccessible, and inconvenient that only a small fraction of people could access them, are transformed into simpler, more accessible and convenient forms that are also, ultimately, lower in cost. We are seeing it happen more rapidly than one could have imagined in higher education, as online learning has exploded: roughly 10 percent of students took at least one online course in 2003, 25 percent in 2008, and nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009.

[...]

Although this transition has begun, much of online learning’s promise for higher education is still on the horizon. For example, online learning has not yet led to lower prices from the perspective of many students—even though many of the online universities operate at lower costs than the traditional universities and enable students to fit coursework around existing jobs or other responsibilities. To date, moreover, significant portions of online learning have not taken advantage of this new medium to personalize instruction and create new, dynamic and individualized learning pathways within a course for students.

Clayton Christensen — Colleges in crisis. Emphasis mine.

These images are slides from a short (10 minutes) presentation I gave at this evening’s #NYEdTech meetup. Our conversation revolved around WordPress as a learning management system, with supporting appearances by Moodle and Blackboard. In the interest of capturing more information on what I talked about, I’ll expand on the slide notes below.

Overall, I had a few significant takeaways from this evening. A key distinction between WordPress and other “traditional” learning management systems is that the former promotes a very “constructivist” educational approach and the latter are strong on generating learning metrics, whether or not professors use them.

Also, WordPress needs a more flexible privacy framework for authors. There are roles and capabilities when it comes to the publishing workflow, but a piece is either published or password-protected at the end of it. As a plugin, it would be useful for students to be able to control whether a piece is public to themselves, between themselves and a few users, between themselves and a specified group, or open to anyone on the web.

Lastly: ”Students use Blackboard and Moodle, then graduate, and never use them again.” WordPress has applications in the real world.

CUNY J-School in a nutshell

• WordPress Multisite 3.1 – Install WordPress once, install your themes and plugins once, and create as many subsites as you need. Our naming schema is *.journalism.cuny.edu and for courses we’re starting to include the year in the URL. Thanks to a domain mapping plugin, publications and students can use their own personal domains on their J-School website.
• 258 student, project, class, and publication sites – Considering the Class of 2011 is only 90 people, and the school is having its 5th anniversary this year, I’m quite happy with this number. The Interactive 2 website for this spring is a good example of what we’ve done with course websites.
• 481 users – Students, faculty, staff and the occasional community member.
• 134 themes available for anyone to use, 16 custom designs – Most of these are from Graph Paper Press and WooThemes which offer affordable licenses on relatively good, GPL’d themes. The custom development work we do is available for remixing on Github.
• 76 plugins – One of these days, I’ll add a view to the tech website to show all of our currently installed plugins. Until then, I published a list of plugins for publishers that has a number of them.
• 2 GB production Rackspace Cloud server, 1 GB development – According to our CPU and memory usage, this is a pretty good fit for us. With bandwidth, our total costs are around $160/month.
• Nginx/PHP5-FPM + MySQL – After battling with Apache for six months, we moved to Nginx/PHP5-FPM at the end of January. Overall, I’ve been much happier with it as it seems to be much more efficient. If you go with Ubuntu 10.10 and PHP 5.3.3, it’s as easy as Apache to set up.
• ~ 200k monthly impressions – Roughly calculated with Quantcast. Still looking for a better cross-network analytics tool.

Current uses of WordPress

• Class discussion
• Students publishing assignments
• Portfolio websites – For examples, check out Alissa Ambrose, Matt Draper, Felipe Cabrera, Zach Kussin, Ian Chant, Patrick Wall, or Megan Izen.
• Running a news publication – The NY City News Service is the publication for the entire school. There are a number of award-winning student productions as well.
• J-School marketing and information
• Documentation and technical resources - Our tech website hopes to be a compendium of knowledge and structured information.

Problems we want to solve with WordPress

• Assignment scheduling with structured capture – Cross-subject collaboration on assignment calendars currently happens through a combination of emails and meetings. This spews problems like a fountain. Ideally, we’d like to capture all assignments within WordPress in a structured way, possibly as a custom post type on each course website. We’d then surface the information so students always have up to date information on their assignments, professors could create new assignments for their students while being respectful of the existing ones, and administrators could look through all of this data to see what intellectual resources need to be created, etc.
• Tracking student knowledge/experience against topics
• Pro-active student support
• Equipment management and conflict handling – Building off the equipment requirements field in assignment scheduling, we’d map demand to supply to see when the pinch points are going to be on, say, the Canon 60Ds. Students could also see current and scheduled availability.
• Better search to make evergreen archives valuable – WordPress’ search is abysmal. Faceting against content types, tags, people, publication dates, etc., in conjunction with a tuned relevance algorithm, would do wondrous things.
• Event management (promotion and possibly RSVPs) – The J-School has an events calendar based on a custom post type, but we’d love to build signage off the data for monitors around the school as well as allow users to RSVP for events.