eCollege: Educator's Voice - Volume 9 Issue 6

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Educator's Voice

Vol 10, Issue 1
March 11, 2009

Looking Back, Looking Ahead….Looking Around

Pearson eCollege is getting ready for our annual users conference, CiTE 2009. Two years ago, we presented our first “10 Year” award to the University of Colorado for being a partner with eCollege for a decade. Last year, we had a few more to give out. This year…THIRTY! Thirty 10-Year awards will fill our luncheon at CiTE and people are excited!

While we’re excited that customer service and technology have been good enough to keep so many customers for so many years, it’s just as exciting to realize that we've been around for so long. In Internet years, we’re like Larry King! So, our theme this year is about looking back, seeing where we are now and trying to impact the future of eLearning for our partners and our world. In that same spirit of innovation and impact on eLearning, here is where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

eCollege embraced Web 1.0 (to give a nod to Tim O’Reilly’s marketing terminology) back in 1996. RealEducation was created! And while some thought the moniker was a bit presumptuous, eLearning came to Colorado. We had all of the usual subjects present: text items, discussion items, online tests, gradebooks, etc. It was an exciting time as the company went public, began integrating with other eLearning vendors and carved out a niche as the primary LMS for profitable schools in the USA.

In 2007, talks began about being acquired by Pearson, the world’s largest education company. One of the reasons Pearson was so excited to partner with eCollege was our solid foundation and past, but also due to our relevancy in the market place today. Innovation is something we always strive for!

To that degree, Pearson was fascinated with our data mining opportunities. Data mining is definitely an important concept enabled by technology like never before! I realized this when my wife was contacted by her credit card company asking if she had her card. Puzzled, she said that she thought so but she would check. While she was hunting for her purse, the credit representative informed her that they called because an amount for gas was purchased that she doesn’t usually get and it was purchased at a gas station she doesn’t usually frequent! (By the way, she did NOT have her card!)

Data mining is powerful. It gives us truly actionable data. And it’s something that is relatively new to education. If you look at innovation in many industries, you’ll see that an outsider’s perspective is often what is needed to bring important change. “Disrupting Class” co-authored by Michael Horn, a CiTE keynote, is an example of the business industry impacting education. Data analytics is the same thing. Pearson eCollege partnered with IBM leading Cognos software to mine the data on our school’s campuses. Correlating user activity, grades, logins, dates, completion rates and many more pieces of “raw data” allow us to measure, predict, and question how education gets done. This can mean better retention rates for schools, better success by teachers, and outcomes tied to real life experiences for students. As an educator, this is what makes education exciting!

Finally, as we look to the future, it’s important to note not just what learning will look like but how learning will be delivered, measured, assessed, etc. While it’s integral to understand Bloom, Gardner, and Fischer for paradigms on learning, personality, narrative, etc., it is also crucial to note new theorists like Johnson and Johnson or K.R. Thompson. It becomes more important to understand how generational learning is changing due to advances in technology. These are things that the academic teams at Pearson eCollege do every day. From new ways to experience collaboration to educational variance, we help align technology with learning.

It is this culture of education that is allowing some of our developers to work on integration of system theory into the LMS portion of our product. Incorporating Axiomatic Theory of Intentional Systems (Thompson, 2008) into discussions of assessment and delivery represents the future of eLearning. Measuring people, progress, learning assets and connections between them is how learning will take place in the future.

I believe you can look at Pearson eCollege as a barometer of technology enabled education. While feature/function wars will always exist, our goal has always been easier, better, stronger education for everyone. You can see it in our past as well as where we are going in our future. You’ll see these changes as we move forward year after year, serving more and more partners for decades each!

--Jeff D Borden, M.A.

Senior Director of Teaching and Learning

Instructor’s Tip:

Educators’ Wish Has Been Granted!

Over the years many educators have told Pearson eCollege that they would really like to see us develop one particular tool that, although it would not be used often, would make their lives much, much easier when developing, or editing, their online courses.

That wish?

To be able to move entire Units, with all of the Content Items under them, to another location in an online course – easily.

Well, we have done it, and it will soon be available to everyone in the newest Pearson eCollege online course platform iteration, .NExT (pronounced “dot next”). If your school doesn’t have it already, you soon will. Your school will be able to enjoy the many enhancements that have been added at the request of our Pearson eCollege educational partners. By far, the most requested capability is to be able to move entire Units throughout a course.

This capability allows for movement in a matter of seconds versus the existing way that could potentially have taken a lot longer with a course full of a lot of content.

It’s now just as easy to rearrange Units as it currently is to rearrange Content Items under the Units. Just go to any Unit tab and click the Toolbox button, then click the link that says Change Unit Order. (Some educators might have changed the name of Units to something like Weeks, Modules or Sections, so the word “Units” would be replaced by that title.) Enter the number in each Unit’s box corresponding to the order you want them to appear in the navigation bar, click Save Changes and you’re done.

Easy enough?

Now that that one’s taken care of, Pearson eCollege will be waiting to hear your .NExT request.

--Paul Silvey