This is the sixth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

From The Wall Street Journal in June, “Daphne Koller on the Future of Online Education”:

“If you put an instructor to sleep 300 years ago and woke him up in a classroom today, he’ll say, ‘Oh, I know exactly where I am,’” says Daphne Koller, co-founder of the online-education company Coursera.

Of course, if you put a reader of The Wall Street Journal to sleep 3 years ago, during “The Year of the MOOC,” and woke him up and showed him an article quoting Daphne Koller today, he’ll say, “Oh, I know exactly where I am.”…

Is the MOOC Hype Fading?

There were plenty of headlines this year that declared that all the hullaballoo about MOOCs, massive open online courses, was dissipating. And ah, the irony: after spending the last few years incessantly covering the supposed promise of MOOCs, the education press found itself incessantly covering “the MOOC revolution that wasn’t” as well. (Disclosure: okay, that last link was written by me.) “The Hype is Dead, but MOOCs Are Marching On,” according to Coursera investor the University of Pennsylvania.

And MOOCs – and online education in general – marched on indeed, still with plenty of marketing spin (although often phrased, in the headline at least, in the form of a question). “Can an Online Teaching Tool Solve One of Higher Education's Biggest Headaches?” asked Slate. “Can Online Education Help Refugees Earn Degrees?” asked The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Can online classrooms help the developing world catch up?” asked The Verge guest-editor Bill Gates. “Can MOOCs Better Help Women in Developing Countries?” asked Edsurge.

Oh sure, some folks who’d previously predicted “the end of college as we know it” dialed it back a little this year, suggesting instead that “Online Education May Be Poised To Take Off.”

All in all, there was still plenty of hype in 2015 about MOOCs and other online education initiatives, often involving (no surprise) the same elite universities the media’s been focused on all along. Take this story from Fortune, for example: “Harvard Business School really has created the classroom of the future.” “Truth be told, an HBX Live session is more a show than a class.” The future of education indeed.

Wait, What’s a “MOOC”?

The definition of “MOOC” has always been contentious, as some have tried to distinguish it from a broader notion of “online education” and some have tried to retain MOOC’s connectivist origins, namely by separating free and open courses from the more commonly closed and VC-funded ones.

It’s no surprise that the attention that MOOCs have received prompts many folks to continue to invoke the acronym, even when the course in question is neither massive nor open nor even online. The University of Michigan, for example, launched a “residential MOOC” this year – with enrollment available only to UM students (just 800 of them), with face-to-face classes with course content conceived like “a TV show, every week a new episode.”

Perhaps MOOCs are just adapting, you could argue. I guess. MIT’s OTTO Scharmer sure did, pronouncing in May “MOOC 4.0” (to which Seattle Pacific University’s Rolin Moe deftly responded, “MOOC 4.No.”

The variation in MOOCs doesn’t just come from adding version numbers to the end. Oh no. The University of Nottingham, for example, trademarked“NOOC” (short for “Nottingham Open Online Course”) this year. The trademark sought to cover usage of “NOOC” on beer mats, gift wrap, pencil sharpeners, CD-ROMs, and much, much more. And copy-and-pasted from the press release to this article without comment: “The world’s first GROOC – a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for groups – co-created by internationally renowned management expert Henry Mintzberg will be launched by McGill University and edX.”

Such innovation.

The Business of MOOCs and Online Education

One way to judge whether or not the hype of MOOCs truly faded in 2015 might be to look at headlines in the media. One way might be to look at press releases and “market research,” such as the fabulous contentions that MOOCs will earn $1.5 billion in revenue this year and that MOOCs will be a $8.5 billion industry by 2020.

And one way to judge MOOC hype is to examine how much attention their providers are still getting from financiers. (No doubt, there’s a connection between PR and VC, as I surmised earlier this year when a series of positive stories in the media about Udacity prompted me to speculate that the company was out fundraising. Sure enough, it was.)

I’ll cover “the business of ed-tech” in the last article in this series, but let me note here: of the top twenty largest rounds of funding in 2015 (at the time that I’m writing this article at least), only seven were not online education companies (or training or tutoring or test-prep companies – the distinctions do get murky)… and one of those seven, General Assembly, does offer some online classes.

The biggest investments of 2015 in online education startups:

• HotChalk ($230,000,000)
• TutorGroup ($200,000,000)
• Lynda.com ($186,000,000)
• Hujiang.com ($157,000,000)
• Udacity ($105,000,000)
• 17zuoye ($100,000,000)
• Udemy ($65,000,000)
• Yuantiku ($60,000,000)
• NetDragon Education ($52,500,000)
• Genshuixue ($50,000,000)
• Varsity Tutors ($50,000,000)
• Coursera ($49,500,000)

(Many of the companies on that list are Chinese; I’ll have more to say about the Chinese ed-tech boom in “The Business of Ed-Tech” article in this series. But it’s worth pointing out here that Coursera in particular has made concerted efforts to expand its presence in China this year, launching a Chinese language specialization among other things.)

On the list above are the three startups probably most closely associated with the MOOC craze – Udacity, Coursera, and Udemy. These three have now raised $160 million, $146.1 million, and $113 million respectively. With this year’s investment, Udacity also became a “unicorn,” that is, a startup with a valuation of at least $1 billion.

It wasn’t all sunny in “the business of MOOC”-land, however. Amplify, which had a pretty disastrous year all around, sold off its computer science AP MOOC to unnamed investors for an undisclosed amount of money.

I’ll have more to say throughout this article on university partnerships with various online education providers, but FutureLearn, UK’s MOOC platform, also received a funding injection this year: £13 million from the Open University. David Kernohan does an excellent job analyzing“FutureLearn finance,” which do need to be considered alongside some of the financial struggles that the OU itself faced this year.

Another old and well-established distance education university that might be in trouble: Athabasca. (Maybe. Maybe not.)

For those institutions looking how to make money from online courses, Edsurge published some innovative advice, suggesting that schools charge for them.

A Few Partnerships and Special Deals

In the early days of the MOOC hype, my year-in-reviewpostschronicled all the various universities which were clamoring to be seen as partners with edX and Coursera. There was still a bit of that this year: Coursera’s new partnerships, for example, included Tomsk State University, National Research Nuclear University, Novosibirsk State University, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Yonsei University, Institut Mines-Telecom, and The University of Cape Town. FutureLearn’s new partners included Complutense University, Durham University, University of Manchester, Keio University, and the University of New South Wales. Purdue joined edX. Despite being a founding member and investor in Coursera, the University of Pennsylvania also joined edX. The University of Michigan, also a founding member of Coursera, joined edX as well. (Inside Higher Ed offered an explanation as to why colleges are “double-dipping” with MOOC providers. tl;dr: universities are covering their bases with their MOOC investments.)

If we look beyond the best-known MOOC platforms, we can see a number of other partnerships struck between universities and education companies – “outsourcing” might be the better word:

Yale announced this year it was “partnering” with 2U to offer a blended Master’s Degree for physician’s assistants. (The deal ran into some accreditation issues that were eventually sorted out, pleasing 2U’s investors greatly.)

edX said it was collaborating with Qualcomm to further develop “edX’s MOOC mobile capabilities and enhance its open source platform to benefit connected learners around the world.”

Alibaba and Peking University announced they were launching a MOOC platform.

Starbucks said it would expand its partnership with ASU Online. (That is, Starbucks employees can now apply for tuition reimbursements for all four years of a degree at the school.) (More about ASU Online below.)

The University of Oklahoma partnered with the History Channel, much to the chagrin of historians at the school, because if there’s one thing you won’t find much of on the History Channel, it’s history.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this fall that “HBCUs Aren’t Sold on Course Partnerships With U. of Phoenix.”

And of course, where there’s a booming business in ed-tech, there’s Pearson. FutureLearn announced it had signed a deal with Pearson to have the education giant handle administration of its MOOC tests. The University of Exeter became the first UK university to partner with Pearson to offer online classes. But things don’t always work out so well – for online education initiatives or for Pearson: The University of Florida cancelled its massive contract with Pearson that would have had the the company brings the school’s degree programs online.

(I suppose I should include an update here on Unizin, the university consortium that launched last year, promising to “enhance colleges’ control of online courses.” It’s been slow to do anything, and I’m still not clear that there’s a “there” there. Not that that stops ed-tech hype, of course.)

Online Education Product Upgrades

Here are a few of the exciting MOOC product updates from 2015:

• The arts-oriented MOOC platform Kadenze launched an LMS called Kannu.
• "Open edX, the open source platform from edX, is now available for free* from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace (*AWS usage fees apply).
• The publisher Springer said it would offer some MOOC students discounts on some textbooks.
• Chinese MOOC students no longer need to use a credit card to pay for their Coursera certificates since the company partnered with the Chinese online payment platform Alipay.
• You can watch Coursera videos on the new Apple TV.
• You can watch MOOC lectures on Jet Blue and on Virgin Airlines. (The Onion had the best “take” on this news.)
• edX made it possible for instructors on its platform to add Creative Commons licenses to their courses. Because “open.”
• Coursera launched “on demand” courses, that is MOOCs with flexible start dates and deadlines.
• And look at that. “Certain courses” on Coursera will no longer be free.

Such innovation.

Legal Troubles and other Downgrades

I realize that in the face of such impressive advances in online education, it’s hard to fathom any fumbles. And yet…

In February, the National Association of the Deaf sued Harvard and MIT, the founders of edX, under the Americans With Disabilities Act. The complaint contended that the universities violated that act by failing to (among other things) close caption MOOCs.

In April, edX settled with the Justice Department over charges that its materials were not accessible to the disabled. “According to the terms of the agreement, edX will make its website and learning-management system fully accessible to the disabled within 18 months; ensure that the system used to create online courses is also accessible within 18 months; and create two new positions to oversee accessibility, among other things. As part of the agreement, edX denied it was not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

I wrote quite a bit in the previous article in this series about legal and legislative actions taken against for-profit higher education companies. At the K–12 level, the target of similar efforts is often K12, Inc, known for its abysmal academic outcomes. In June, “A group of 16 California teachers filed formal letters of complaint against online charter schools operated by K12 Inc., alleging violations including misuse of public funds and breaches of student privacy rights,” Bloomberg Business reported. In November, Buzzfeed reported that California’s Attorney General was investigating K12.

Despite these investigations, a headline from Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy on K12 Inc – perhaps on much of for-profit online education – rings true: “How Controversial Online Charter Schools Push Aside Their Opponents.” It helps to have powerful political allies, I suppose. Related: “Coursera, K12 Make Bold Moves to Drive Learning,” according to the Clayton Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn.

Contents May Include…

As I’ve argued in a previous article in this series, there is a concerted effort to reframe education as “workforce training” with an emphasis on “high tech skills.” MOOCs with founders in artificial intelligence labs at Stanford and MIT have done well to tap into that very narrative.

But online education isn’t only about “learning to code,” even if “learning to code” seems to draw the lion’s share of attention. Other topics from online courses that made the news in 2015: “philanthropy” (MOOCs to teach people how to donate their money); art; humanities; the Iowa Presidential Caucuses; superheroes“ (and hey, I finished this MOOC!); the TV show The Strain; US History; contemporary American poetry; education reform; the Kennedy family (and this particular MOOC was noteworthy as the first to be nominated for an Emmy Award. The future of ed-tech remains TV); bias in the tech workplace (an online course offered by Facebook, which continues to do quite poorly when it comes to diversity in the workplace, but why would that stop it from teaching a class, amirite); medical education (shudder); and Mao Zedong (”propaganda“ according to The New York Times and Inside Higher Ed. Or perhaps ”transparency and openness," according to George Veletsianos).

And here’s another business opportunity for ed-tech providers: the Corrective Education Company offers online courses for those busted for shoplifting. In Slate’s words,

Imagine you’re browsing at Bloomingdale’s when a security guard taps you on the shoulder and accuses you of shoplifting. He takes you to a private room, sits you down, and runs your name through a database to see if you have any outstanding warrants. Then he tells you that you have two options. The first involves him calling the police, who might arrest you and take you to jail. The second allows you to walk out of the store immediately, no questions asked – right after you sign an admission of guilt and agree to pay $320 to take an online course designed to make you never want to steal again.

Who’s Enrolling? (And Who’s Completing?)

The media’s fascination with the “massiveness” of MOOCs continued throughout 2015, as various schools and providers boasted that they’d set records for the “biggest ever.” The BBC reported that FutureLearn had some 370,000 students enrolled in a British Council course preparing for an English language test. And Edsurge reported in September that “Udacity, Coursera and edX Now Claim Over 24 Million Students.” Yes, people still sign up for MOOCs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education was on it.

Meanwhile, Politico reported this fall that “Virtual schools are booming. Who’s paying attention?” It’s a good question, because as much attention as MOOCs have received in recent years from the media, the rest of online education, particularly at the K–12 level, has not (necessarily) seen as much scrutiny. Or maybe people have forgotten all the times that it has.

Researchers, on the other hand, have long analyzed education technology – what works and for whom. I’ll explore the research on MOOCs and online education in more detail below, as scholars explored why students and what kinds of students enroll, for example.

This spring, a survey by the Instructional Technology Council found an increase in online enrollments at two-year colleges. But there were some high profile initiatives – ASU Online’s partnership with Starbucks and the University of Florida Online, for example – that failed to meet their enrollment goals.

(Elsewhere in Florida: the University of Central Florida boasted “mega-classes” this year, “enrolling in one case nearly four times as many students as their assigned classrooms can seat and students sprawled in the aisles.” But you can watch the videos streaming online so that’s fun for those who’ve actually paid to attend a residential school.)

There were some hints early this year based on previous years’ IPEDS data that this idea that online education programs would continue to expand might be flawed. (Perhaps the MOOC hype clouded folks’ judgment and expectations?) From Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill: “No Discernible Growth in US Higher Ed Online Learning.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that the continued growth of online education within US higher ed was a foregone conclusion. We all know it’s happening; the questions is how to adapt to the new world.

But what if the assumption is wrong? Based on the official Department of Education / NCES new IPEDS data for Fall 2013 term, for the first time there has been no discernible growth in postsecondary students taking at least one online course in the US.

Hill also examined the IPEDS data to identify the schools with the largest online enrollments:

1. University of Phoenix
2. Liberty University
3. Ashford University
4. Kaplan
5. American Public University
6. Grand Canyon University
7. Walden University
8. DeVry University
9. Western Governors University
10. Everest College

For-profits dominate Hill’s list, although these institutions – most of them at least – also experienced significant declines in distance education enrollment.

Despite the enrollment figures – up or down, concerns remain about completion rates in online courses, particularly in MOOCs. A recent story in The Wall Street Journala> about Udacity's partnership with Georgia Tech for an online master's degree in computer science notes that just twenty of the 380 students who initially enrolled in the program have graduated.

This year, there were several efforts to spur students’ to finish their MOOCs through extrinsic motivation (and some argue that making students pay for classes will be sufficient to keep them on task): $1000 in Amazon Web Services, for example, for completing edX's Entrepreneurship 101 and 102 courses or a piece of comic art signed by Stan Lee for completing edX’s Superheroes class. (I confess: this was on my mind when I stuck with what I thought was a pretty unsatisfactory MOOC.)

It’s not that shocking (but it’s pretty gross) since “grit” has become such a popular buzzword in education reform that students who fail to finish MOOCs were accused by some of having “limited self control.”

Credits and Financial Aid

I’ve already looked in some detail in this year-end series on “credits and credentialing.” Whether offered by accredited or unaccredited providers, whether Bachelor’s degrees or “nanodegrees,” we always come back around to debates about whether or not completing these online courses “count.” Do they have “integrity,” as Hillary Clinton asked on the campaign trail? Will schools accept them? Will employers?

Certainly ed-tech startups and the tech press want us to believe that, yes, employers will. As The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in February, “Meet the New, Self-Appointed MOOC Accreditors: Google and Instagram.”

MOOC and other online providers did boast partnerships made in order to boost graduates’ employment chances – not just with Google and Instagram, but with Snapdeal and Shazam. (Yes, these partnerships mostly involve the tech sector.) Coursera wrote on its own blog that “Top Companies Work with University Partners to Help Create Capstone Projects with Real World Applications,” and no doubt this re-inscribes what I’ve called “the employability narrative” where the curriculum of higher education is shaped by employers’ demands. This close connection with corporate partners will, according to Inside Higher Ed at least, also underwrite Coursera’s newly found business model.

Further aiding Coursera’s outlook for revenue: charging for courses and certificates. Coursera says that it has its own financial aid fund that students can apply for in order to pay for their certificates, and of course, the Department of Education announced an experiment this year that would make MOOCs and other “alternate ed-tech providers” eligible for federal financial aid.

Financial aid is one important consideration for students; whether or not these online classes actually count for credit and towards graduation is another. According to Edsurge, unlike Udacity and Coursera’s corporate partnerships, edX has opted to “double down on creating higher quality, personalized and virtually proctored learning experiences that can be offered for credit to learners on a path towards a degree.”

In January, Steven Klinsky, founder of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital, donated $1 million to edX with the hopes of making the freshmen year of college - or at least some edX classes - free.

In April, Arizona State University announced that it had partnered with edX to offer a freshmen year of college via MOOCs. Dubbed “the Global Freshmen Academy,” students will pay $200 per credit hour (so $600 for a three-credit course), plus a $45 identity verification fee per class. “The catch,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reported: there’s no financial aid. Another “catch”: that’s more expensive than community college. Another “catch”: apparently ASU hadn’t run this plan by its accreditor when it made the announcement. Inside Higher Ed made a public records request for the edX-Arizona State University contract because you always need to read the Terms of Service, man.

The news prompted “Dean Dad” Matt Reed to ask “what problem are ASU and edX solving?” Also from Reed, some “further thoughts” and some dismay about how transfer credits will be accepted (that is, when accompanied by a fee).

In September, the Texas State University System announced a “Freshman Year for Free” program in which “students can earn a full year of credit through massive open online courses offered by edX and coordinated by a new nonprofit called the Modern States Education Alliance. The only costs to students would be either Advanced Placement or College Level Examination Program tests, which would be passed after completing various MOOCs. Appropriate scores would be required on the tests to receive credit from Texas State campuses.”

In October, MIT announced a “MicroMaster’s,” in which students could get half their degree via MOOCs. (That is, a master’s degree in supply chain management.)

Elsewhere in MOOCs (and online courses) for credit: California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Charter Oak State College. For its part, Western Governors University said it had begun referring “underprepared” students to StraighterLine, an unaccredited online education provider.

Teaching Online

Some faculty have expressed concerns about the implications of the MOOC hype, particularly when it comes to their job security. (Faculty aren’t alone in their complaints, particularly as sites turn to the free labor of “crowdsourcing” in lieu of paying people for their work.) Comments like this don’t help, from an interview in the Financial Times this summer: “Mr Thrun knows what he doesn’t want for his company; professors in tenure, which he claims limits the ability to react to market demands.” Thrun referred to Udacity again and again in the media as “Uber for education),” an analogy with all sorts of negative implications: privacy issues, a reluctance if not refusal to accommodate people with disabilities, and a dismantling of legal and labor protections.

There were some efforts to protect faculty and to reward rather than scare them into (or away from) teaching online. In March, The Daily Illini reported that the University of Illinois Senate Executive Committee had passed a resolution that professors should be paid for developing and teaching MOOCs. In April, Academic Partnerships said it would share tuition revenue with faculty at its partner institutions.

But there were still plenty of signs that neither universities nor third-party education providers have quite worked out all the details of the labor and IP issues surrounding MOOCs and online courses. SZ International wrote about how Paul-Oliver Dehaye was stripped of control of his Coursera class. Inside Higher Ed followed up on the sexual harassment charges against MIT physics professor Walter Lewin, which reportedly started “day one” of his edX course. It also looked at what will happen to Lewin’s “legacy” after MIT deleted all of its lecture videos from Lewin’s courses. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about Jen Ebbeler’s story about the development of the UT Austin class “Introduction to Ancient Rome”: “When Your Online Course Is Put Up for Adoption.” The Portland Press Herald recently explored what happens to an online course when the professor dies. And Udemy, which has boasted that its top instructors make millions of dollars selling courses on its “MOOC” platform, found itself the subject of several angry blog posts when instructors on other online education platforms complained that their courses were being pirated there. “Of course people are ripping off online courses,” Vice’s Sarah Jeong wrote in response (to which I mutter something about the lack of Creative Commons licensing in MOOCs and some providers’ penchant for “openwashing.”)

Remember back in 2013 when Slate imagined that celebrities would teach MOOCs? This year it was a Campus Technology article: “When Actors Replace Instructors as On-Camera Talent.” And speaking of celebrities, from The New York Times: “How to Take a Class From Serena Williams and Usher.” These headline-grabbing stories aside, “The average instructor of a massive open online course is most likely to be a white man in his 50s with two decades of experience in academe but none in online education, according to a study by researchers at Indiana University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

In other news about the labor and costs of online education: “MOOC development more expensive than many think.” But I think by now most of us realize that MOOCs are not so cheap after all.

Research

Continuing a trend from 2014, there was a substantial amount of research published this year about MOOCs and about online education more broadly. Of course, when I write my weekly round-up of education news, I always put quotation marks around the word “research” to underscore the differences between peer-reviewed academic research, market research, and so on. Too often, the media parrots press releases without really interrogating methodology or results.

Here’s a sampling of some of the “research” that gleaned headlines this year (which, as you can see, is often quite contradictory):

“What public media reveals about MOOCs: A systematic analysis of news reports” in the British Journal of Educational Technology.

Research on online education – “Preparing for the Digital University” – was published by George Siemens, Dragan Gašević, and Shane Dawson. Stephen Downes responded in the OLDaily. George Siemens responded on Twitter. Downes then responded in a blog post. Siemens then responded to the responses in a blog post. Then George Veletsianos weighed in. And Downes had somemore to say as did Siemens.

NPR reported that “A Wellesley College and University of Maryland study finds Sesame Street has a big impact on how well kids do in school. Children who watch the show are less likely to fall behind in later grades.” Edsurge, along with many publications, went with a MOOC-related headline: “The Original MOOC: Can Sesame Street Replace Preschool?.” Of course, Sesame Street is pretty much the opposite of the VC-funded MOOCs, in part because it was designed by education researchers, not software engineers. By me: “No, Sesame Street Is Not the First MOOC.”

MIT and Harvard released what they called “one of the largest investigations of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to date,” analysis of 68 MOOCs and 1.7 million students in courses that the two schools offered between July 2012 and September 2014. (Here are Justin Reich’s thoughts on the research.)

Research from Justin Reich and John Hansen on socioeconomic status and MOOC enrollees found, among other things, that “Overall, HarvardX registrants tend to reside in more affluent neighborhoods.” This research was recently published in Science.

MIT and Harvard published research on how people cheat in MOOCs. (That is, they create multiple accounts. Inconceivable, I know.)

According to a study by CREDO, cyber charter schools have an “overwhelmingly negative impact.”

There’s little evidence that online credit recovery programs are effect, according to the Shanker Institute.

Students in MOOCs self-report MOOCs work. 87% said they felt MOOCs benefited their career. (Just 33% said there were tangible career benefits.) 88% said there were educational benefits. (Just 18% said there were tangible educational benefits.) The study, based on a survey of Coursera students, is framed by Coursera thusly: “Coursera Study Shows Positive Career and Educational Outcomes for Learners.” (But as the survey only had a 6% response rate, I'm not sure you can claim anything at all based on it.)

MOOC review site Class Central published a report on how much studying students in free online classes do. (Spoiler alert: less than students in traditional college courses do.)

MOOC review site Coursetalk published a report on “What Reviews Divulge About Online Education.” The reviews, it says, are overwhelming positive.

From a paper titled “Changing Distributions: How Online College Classes Alter Student and Professor Performance”: “Using an instrumental variables approach and data from DeVry University, this study finds that, on average, online course-taking reduces student learning by one-third to one-quarter of a standard deviation compared to conventional in-person classes. Taking a course online also reduces student learning in future courses and persistence in college.”

According to a study by the American Economic Association, “increases in online class size have no impact on student grades, student persistence in the course or the likelihood of students enrolling in future courses.”

“There’s No Substitute for In-Person Lectures,” Pacific Standard reported, summarizing a paper that found “that students who watched a videotaped lecture recalled less of the material, and felt less engaged in the subject, than they did after sitting through a similar live lesson.”

There’s “no significance difference” between the learning outcomes in face-to-face and hybrid courses, according to research by Ithaka S+R.

The Gates Foundation hired SRI Education to evaluate the ed-tech investments that it has made. Among the findings: "Online courses in which students’ dominant role was solving problems or answering questions had more positive effects than those where most of the students’ time was spent reading text or listening to lecture videos."

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon said they’d discovered that “In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching.”

(This is also known as Reich’s Law: students who do stuff tend to do more stuff and tend to do stuff better.)

So, What Have MOOCs Changed?

So here are the promises I think most commonly invoked as part of the great MOOC hype: that MOOCs will democratize education, that MOOCs will be free, that MOOCs will decrease the cost of college, that MOOCs will improve universities’ brand (and enrollment). Three years after “the Year of the MOOC,” these all seem like unfulfilled promises.

So after all the hype and all the hoopla and all the headlines and all the investment and all the students and all the research, we find ourselves still asking “have MOOCs helped or hurt?”

“Cut Through the Hype, and MOOCs Still Have Had a Lasting Impact,” The Chronicle of Higher Education insists.

Part of that impact, some argue, involves investment in teaching improvements – both online and off. And so while some might not see MOOCs themselves as good investments, no doubt they have prompted schools to rethink what their online presence will look like. (For better and for worse.)

The Open University’s Martin Weller has already predicted that 2016 will be “the year of MOOC hard questions” as universities really scrutinize whether or not these investments in online education have paid off (and paid off in the ways that the MOOCs’ biggest corporate providers/cheerleaders have promised they would). We shall see.

And if not, then “when the MOOC is Over,” turn out the lights…

This is the seventh article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Competing Narratives Surrounding Education Data

“Data” – its collection, analysis, monetization, and usage – might just be one of the most controversial elements of education technology. I say this despite the assuredness from many in industry and government who continued throughout 2015 to make wild promises about what “data” can do: that the analysis of education data will unlock the “black box” of the human mind and as such make learning more efficient; that the analysis of education data will enable better, more informed decision-making.

There has been a growing backlash in recent years against a perceived obsession with data, “seen as a proxy for an obsessive focus on tracking standardized test scores,” The New York Times wrote this spring. “But some school districts, taking a cue from the business world, are fully embracing metrics, recording and analyzing every scrap of information related to school operations. Their goal is to help improve everything from school bus routes and classroom cleanliness to reading comprehension and knowledge of algebraic equations.”

“Anything that can be counted or measured will be,” the newspaper observed.

Measuring and counting anything and everything – this underscores the concerns that many have about education data: that its collection is overzealous and as such a privacy violation; that its storage is a security risk; that its analysis is furthering a culture of algorithmic control and surveillance.

After the disastrous end of inBloom in 2014, a data infrastructure initiative funded by the Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, it did appear as though parents and others who were demanding better privacy protections for education data had the upper hand – at least in the court of public opinion. Schools and ed-tech companies found themselves on the defensive about what potentially sensitive student information they were collecting and sharing and why.

So this year, the industry made a concerted effort to push back on the PR front and reframe the issue: “Standardized Tests Suck. But the Fix Is More Data, Not Less,” Wired wrote in March. “Why Opting Out of Student Data Collection Isn’t the Solution,” the Future of Privacy Forum’s Jules Polonetsky and Brenda Leong wrote in March. “Are We Overregulating Student Data Privacy?” Edsurge asked in June. “Privacy Push Must Not Prevent Personalized Learning,” the Clayton Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn wrote in July.

As I will explore in more detail below, probably the main way in which the “data” issue gets reframed by the ed-tech industry is to describe it as a cornerstone of “personalization.”

But “data” remains too a cornerstone of education “accountability” (as I’ve noted in my articles on “the politics of education technology” and “standardized testing.”) And when the Gates Foundation announced its new higher ed agenda in March, it included the creation of “a national data infrastructure that enables consistent collection and reporting of key performance metrics for all students in all institutions that are essential for promoting the change needed to reform the higher education system to produce more career-relevant credential.” InBloom isn’t dead at all, it appears.

Also echoing inBloom, this news from July: “LearnSphere, a new $5 million federally-funded project at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to become ‘the biggest open repository of education data’ in the world, according to the project leader, Ken Koedinger.” Koedinger is the co-founder of Carnegie Learning, a “cognitive tutor” company – that’s 80s-speak for “personalization.” And that’s why I write again and again about “zombie ideas” in ed-tech.

LearnSphere said it would store “No student names, no addresses, no zip codes, no social security numbers… No race, family income or special education designations. ‘The student identifier column, even if yours is already anonymized, we re-anonymize it automatically,’ [Koedinger] added.”

The promise to “de-anonymize” and “de-identify” was one way in which the industry responded to concerns about privacy and security this year – that is, it didn’t agree to collect less data, but said it would work to obscure its owners’ identity. According to a report released by the industry-funded Future of Privacy Forum, “Integrated with other robust privacy and security protections, appropriate de-identification – choosing the best de-identification technique based on a given data disclosure purpose and risk level – provides a pathway for protecting student privacy without compromising data’s value.”

But completely de-anonymized data is not really a “thing.” According to research on credit card transactions published early this year by MIT’s Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, “knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records.” In the midst of privacy and security concerns, this means too that there’s an important trade-off here, particularly for education researchers: “higher standards for de-identification can lead to lower-value de-identified data.”

There are trade-offs that run throughout the various approaches to education data: more or less privacy, more or less security, more or less transparency, more or less surveillance, more or less agency, and so on.

"Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions." - Education researcher Justin Reich on "Rebooting MOOC Research."

Personalization (Whatever That Means)

But it’s not really clear to me that more or less “data” really equals more or less “personalization” – although that’s certainly how the ed-tech industry likes to frame it. Why, if you listen to the way “personalization” gets pitched, it’s almost as if schools had no way of knowing how well students understood a concept or how often they were coming to class or which school lunch kids preferred – and no way to respond to these “personal preferences” – before “learning analytics” and “dashboards” made this possible.

It’s probably worth starting by asking what exactly do we mean by “personalization”? The technology sector likes to invoke “personalization” too, of course – it’s your friends’ status updates as Facebook’s algorithm deems best to display them; it’s the list of movies available in its current catalog that Netflix recommends you watch next. There are other industries that have long boasted “personalization”: the anagrammed towel set, your name on a tourist trap tchotchke (as long as your name is one of the most popular names, of course. It’s pretty rare to find “Audrey” on that crap). But just like that sort of “personalization,” you’re still stuck with industry-standards when it comes to towel dimension. You’re still stuck with the choices of color they make available. Contrary to the Burger King slogan, personalization doesn’t mean you can have it your way. (Oh okay, for an ed-tech-specific definition, see: The Glossary of Education Reform.)

Often when invoked by those in ed-tech, “personalization” is presented as a counter to (the strawman argument) “the factory model of education,” and the notion that, without ed-tech’s interventions and data collection and analysis, classrooms operate on a “one size fits all” model. “Personalization” is often used to explain what various teaching machines offer – both the earliest versions of the 20th century and the more recent VC-funded “adaptive” textbooks and tests: the ability for students to move through a lesson or curriculum at their own pace.

Royal Roads University professor George Veletsianos recently described personalized learning as “the locus of ed-tech debates,” which seems quite right to me. “Personalized learning” – whatever that means – raises all sorts of questions about all those trade-offs I mentioned above: about privacy and security and agency and transparency and surveillance and agency and ethics. And I’d have chosen “personalization” as one of this year’s “Top Ed-Tech Trends” if I didn’t think it was more fitting to head the list of “Best Ed-Tech Buzz and Bullshittery.”

In August, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison say they are getting closer to designing a system to deliver the ideal lesson plan for each student, through a process they call ‘machine teaching.’” Inside Higher Ed covered the research a month later: “Imagine if schoolteachers and college professors were immediately able to identify how each of their students learns, what learning style works best for each child and what new topics he or she is struggling with.” Just imagine.

Now imagine if the media approached the claims of ed-tech “personalization” with more scrutiny and skepticism and ceased writing headlines like “This Robot Tutor Will Make Personalizing Education Easy.”

What does research – and there is decades of it – tell us about the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction, “cognitive tutors,” and the like? (Spoiler alert: it’s actually a mixed bag.)

But you wouldn’t know it from the marketing hype: “Artificially intelligent software is replacing the textbook – and reshaping American education,” Slate argued this fall. “Think of it as a friendly robot-tutor in the sky,” Jose Ferreira, Knewton founder and CEO, said in a press release this summer. “Knewton plucks the perfect bits of content for you from the cloud and assembles them according to the ideal learning strategy for you, as determined by the combined data-power of millions of other students.” “We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile,” Ferreira told NPR. Knewton is a “magic pill,” he told Wired.

Dear tech press and politicians and gullible people everywhere: there is no magic pill.

In response to the hype around Knewton (which Edsurge reported was raising a $47 million round of funding this year) Mindwire Consulting’s Michael Feldstein was quoted by NPR as saying that Ferreira is “selling snake oil.” He elaborated on his blog:

No responsible educator or parent should adopt a product – even if it is free – from a company whose CEO describes it as a “robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind” and give you content “proven most effective for people like you every single time.” I’m sorry, but this sort of quasi-mystical garbage debases the very notion of education and harms Knewton’s brand in the process.

If you want to sell me a product that helps students to learn, then don’t insult my intelligence. Explain what the damned thing does in clear, concrete, and straightforward language, with real-world examples when possible. I may not be a data scientist, but I’m not an idiot either.

Feldstein and his colleague Phil Hill also took the learning management system Desire2Learn to task for questionable marketing claims. Here’s Feldstein again:

I can’t remember the last time I read one of D2L’s announcements without rolling my eyes. I used to have respect for the company, but now I have to make a conscious effort not to dismiss any of their pronouncements out-of-hand. Not because I think it’s impossible that they might be doing good work, but because they force me to dive into a mountain of horseshit in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold at the bottom. Every. Single. Time.

So here we have two of the most highly funded education technology startups – Knewton which has raised in $147.25 million in venture capital and D2L which has raised $165 million– making questionable (at best) claims about what their products can do with the data they collect in order to “personalize” education. But as long as the technology sector builds on those claims and journalists continue to promote the spin and investors continue to fund it…

In May, AltSchool, a “microschool” founded by former Google exec Max Ventilla, announced $100 million in venture capital from a group of investors that Edsurge described as “Silicon Valley’s blue bloods”: Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley Community Foundation (that’s a fund that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan advise), Emerson Collective (that’s the fund run by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs), First Round Capital, Learn Capital, John Doerr, Harrison Metal, Jonathan Sackler, Omidyar Network, and Adrian Aoun.

While in previous years, it was Khan Academy or MOOCs that found itself the darling of a credulous education/technology press, AltSchool was clearly the beloved in 2015 as publication after publication pennedveritable love letters to the private school startup. I’ll have more to say about AltSchool below when I look more closely at how startups like this and those who promote their particular version of “personalization” are fostering a culture of surveillance.

AltSchool was hardly the only big name boasting that the future of school would draw on tech-heavy “personalization.” In September, Facebook formerly unveiled the work it has undertaken with the Summit Public Schools charter chain. It’s called a Personal Learning Platform – linguistically, at least, quite different from a “learning management system,” I suppose. According to Edsurge, “The tool started as a string of Google docs and spreadsheets, but Summit needed help to refine it into a full-scale platform for the seven schools in its network. First it hired a full-time engineer. But to open the tool up for the entire world to use, Summit needed more help. So it called up Facebook.”

Related: in December, Zuckerberg and Chan announced they would donate 99% of their Facebook shares to a new LLC that would invest in, among other things, “personalization” in education – that is, having already invested in the Summit Public Schools system and in AltSchool. I think we can see where this is headed… (If you don’t, know that I’ll cover this more in the final article in this series, “The Business of Ed-Tech.”)

“Personalized education does not mean kids just doing what they want. In fact, quite the opposite.” – AltSchool founder Max Ventilla

(Personalization versus) Privacy

In previous years, when I’ve covered the topic of “data,” I’ve usually written too about how the demands for more data quickly run afoul of students’ and teachers’ privacy. (To recap: “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014: Data and Privacy.” “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: Data vs. Privacy.” “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: Education Data and Learning Analytics.” "Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2011: Data (Which Still Means Mostly Standardized Testing.)

There was quite a bit of coverage of the privacy implications of ed-tech this year – a shout-out to The New York Times’ Natasha Singer who wrote a number of articles on the topic and to Stephanie Simons, who left Politico this year after being one of the best education reporters on this beat. A sampling of their work: “Cyber snoops track students’ activity.” “Tools for Tailored Learning May Expose Students’ Personal Details.” “Privacy Pitfalls as Education Apps Spread Haphazardly.” “When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too.” “Parents Challenge President to Dig Deeper on Ed Tech.”

Kudos should also go to Bill Fitzgerald, who along with his FunnyMonkey colleague Jeff Graham, joined Common Sense Media this year. Both Common Sense Media and Fitzgerald were fairly tireless this year in advocating for student privacy – The New York Times called the organization an “advocacy army.” Among the products and services that Fitzgerald analyzed: Facebook and Summit Public Schools’ personalized learning platform; “MySchoolBucks, or Getting Lunch with a Side of Targeted Advertising”; Google Apps for Education Terms of Service (or the lack thereof); Remind’s new Terms of Service; and Clever’s new privacy policy. Thanks in part to Fitzgerald’s urging and support, a number of startups, including Clever, “open sourced” their privacy policies, making them available on GitHub so it would be easy for others to “fork” them. (Here’s a list of those participating in that effort.)

Via Kickboard’s Jennifer Medbery, a good guide on what startups should consider as they think through their privacy policies and security practices. For its part, the US Department of Education also released model Terms of Service guidance “aimed at helping schools and districts protect student privacy while using online educational services and applications.” It’s unfortunate that the department’s “best practice” guidelines suggest that TOS should say schools – not students – own the data, including all IP.

Also unfortunate: as privacy becomes increasingly important for schools and for parents, it then gets used as a marketing claim, as companies promised “kid friendly” products with “private sharing” features and the like.

Once again, Google found itself repeatedly in hot water over its products, its usage of user data, and privacy this year: Consumer groups filed a complaint in April with the FTC over the YouTube Kids app, “claiming it misleads parents and violates rules on ‘unfair and deceptive marketing’ for kids.” In November, the YouTube Kids app faced more complaints, this time over junk food ads. In June, Privacy Online News reported that “Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on.” In November, Detectify Labs reported that “Popular Google Chrome extensions are constantly tracking you per default, making it very difficult or impossible for you to opt-out. These extensions will receive your complete browsing history, all your cookies, your secret access-tokens used for authentication (i.e., Facebook Connect) and shared links from sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The third-party services in use are hiding their tracking by all means possible, combined with terrible privacy policies hidden inside the Chrome Web Store.”

But hey, schools keep on adopting Google Apps for Education, and Google Chromebooks “now make up half of classroom devices sold.”

In December, the EFF filed an FTC complaint against Google, charging that the company “deceptively tracks students’ Internet browsing.” Google disputed the complaint, insisting that it complies with both the law and the Student Privacy Pledge (to which the EFF responded in turn.)

That Student Privacy Pledge was announced late last year, an initiative put forward by the industry groups the Software and Information Industry Association and the Future of Privacy Forum. (Google is a funder of the Future of Privacy Forum, and the latter stepped up to defend Google against the EFF’s complaint.) Among other things, signers of the pledge pinky-wore they would not sell student information and would only use data for “authorized education purposes,” whatever the hell that means. (For what it’s worth, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in November that test takers were not harmed when testing companies sold their personally identifiable information.)

Google was not one of the original signers of the Student Privacy Pledge, but it did add its name in January. There’ve been a lot of questions about whether or not the pledge – with Google’s signature affixed or any of the others – is actually meaningful at all. (Let’s ask the Court of Appeals!)

And that’s a problem, more broadly, not just for privacy pledges but for privacy laws. These are often woefully out-of-date, lagging behind the data-related implications of new technologies, and simply do not protect students.

One of the worst violations of student privacy this year probably isn’t related to education technology, but I’ll note it here nonetheless because it does underscore how very little FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, actually covers. From Katie Rose Guest Pyral’s story in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Raped on Campus? Don’t Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing”:

In January, a rape survivor sued the University of Oregon for mishandling her sexual-assault case. Through the campus judicial process, the university found the three male students responsible for gang-raping her (not the technical term). They were kicked off the varsity basketball team and eventually out of school. But there is a lot more to the story, including the ways that the university delayed the investigation of the students long enough so that they could finish up their basketball season.

The story is long, and it might destroy your faith in humanity, even if the university did drop its counterclaim against the survivor last week. In that counterclaim, Oregon had accused her of “creating a very real risk that survivors will wrongly be discouraged from reporting sexual assaults.”

But I want to focus on only one sliver of this case - one ugly, frightening sliver. I guess we can thank the university's administration for shining some daylight on the legal quirk that I'm about to talk about, because otherwise it might have stayed hidden.

The Oregon administration accessed the rape survivor's therapy records from its counseling center and handed them over to its general counsel's office to help them defend against her lawsuit. They were using her own post-rape therapy records against her.

It was a senior staff therapist in the counseling unit who blew the whistle on the administration's actions. In her public letter, she sounds horrified that the work she thought was protected by medical privilege could be violated in such a fashion.

The university claimed that FERPA gave them a right to access the victim’s mental health records. And while the Department of Education said it might issue new guidance on FERPA after Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Suzanne Bonamici inquired how the hell this was legal, we saw little change when it came to updating the federal student privacy law, on this or on other matters.

As I chronicled in my post “The Politics of Education Technology,” it’s not that there weren’t legislative proposals. Therewereplenty. Despite being (or, because it was) a proposal in President Obama’s State of the Union address, at the federal level at least –states have had more luck – privacy bills in Congress went nowhere.

The European Court of Justice, on the other hand, did push the envelope on some of these legal questions about privacy. It declared in October that EU-US “safe harbor” rules regulating firms’ retention of Europeans’ data in the US were invalid – a ruling that could have implications for US ed-tech companies operating in Europe.

But in the US at least, we end 2015 with that 1974 privacy law still in place. Oh sure, college students did briefly find a way to use it to their benefit, forcing schools to hand over their admissions files and letters of recommendation – something that in turn prompted “elite colleges” to destroy admissions records. So I’m not sure how we can declare that any sort of victory in privacy or intelligent data usage.

A few notable reports from 2015 on data and privacy: from Education Week: “A Special Report on Student-Data Privacy.” From the National Education Policy Center, a report called “On the Block: Student Data and Privacy in the Digital Age.” From the ACLU of Massachusetts, a report on student data and privacy in K–12.

One question I want us to always keep in mind when we talk about education technology and privacy was asked in May by danah boyd: Which Students Get to Have Privacy?

Wait, I have another question too (this one a headline from The Guardian in April): “Is the online surveillance of black teenagers the new stop-and-frisk?” I’m going to cover social media monitoring, free speech, and social justice in the next article in this series. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that privacy and surveillance are equity issues.

Ed-Tech InfoSec

According to a Campus Technology story in June, “More than one third of all malware events in 2014 happened within the education sector.” And Education Week reported this spring that “Data breaches are costing companies in education up to $300 per compromised record, making it the second most impacted sector – behind only healthcare – for businesses with lost or stolen records globally.” Nonetheless, there was little indication in 2015 that the sector was going to pull its act together, and every indication that its obsession with collecting more and more data would make it even more of a target.

It’s an old video now – old in ed-tech startup years, that is. But I like to refer to the comments made by Knewton’s CEO at the Department of Education’s Datapalooza event back in 2012. The video is on YouTube (and was posted to the Department’s website too):

We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything. Because we have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has. We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.

And okay, as I’ve already written above (and elsewhere), I think these claims are dubious at best. But they – quite inadvertently, no doubt – underscore one of the major issues that education technology companies and schools and hell, the Department of Education itself is still struggling with: the security of all this education data that’s being amassed.

This year as years past, there were a number of data breaches at schools: at Cal State (80,000 students affected); in British Columbia (as many as 34 million students affected); at Central New Mexico Community College (3000 students affected); and ULCA Health (as many as 4.5 million people affected). The University of Connecticut reported a “criminal cyberintrusion” of its engineering college, blaming Chinese hackers. Penn State also said“hackers from China” had infiltrated its computer systems in an attack that had lasted more than two years. Rutgers also said it was under repeated “cyberattacks.” The University of Virginia’s IT system was hit with a “cyberattack.” In March, the University of Chicago admitted it had suffered a breach that affected students and employees and included their Social Security numbers. Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University admitted to a data breach, also involving personnel records and Social Security numbers. Harvard admitted in July that it had suffered a breach, impacting eight colleges and administrations.

And the Department of Education itself, with all its purported guidance for ed-tech companies about Terms of Services and the like – continued to have its own issues with security. It had 91 data breaches in 2015. 91! An employee of the department was also found to have committed identity theft by using information gleaned from students’ loan applications. Awesome leadership.

Some of these security breaches did involve “cyberintrusions,” to be sure, and while blaming “Chinese hackers” seemed to be a ready excuse, many schools’ security problems occurred simply because of human error, were traced to “internal” causes, and/or were done by students themselves. The latter typically involved changing grades and attendance records. Many of these students were charged with felonies for “hacking,” even if they’d only done as much as “shoulder-surfed” their teachers’ passwords in order to gain access to their school’s computer systems. With far too much frequency this year, schools were forced to admit that they’d accidentally released confidential records, posted them online, and such.

Beware of state-sponsored sites that promised in 2015 to “keep kids safe” – those in South Korea and in the UK, for example – were also found to have big security holes.

Elsewhere in security breaches and potential security breaches thanks to tech companies (and not schools): a massive breach from the toy-maker VTech (one in which some 4.8 million families and some 6.8 million children could be affected). Pearson VUE experienced a data breach. There were potential flaws with Lenovo devices, with Microsoft’s Windows 10, with Mattel’s Hello Barbie toy, and with Android tablets for kids. Cheat-on-your-spouse site Ashley Madison suffered a data breach, and oh my, there were lots of school-issued email addresses among those leaked. Damn, even Taylor Swift’s website served as an example of poor privacy practices for children."

Oh look: more solid reporting from The New York Times’ Natasha Singer: “Uncovering Security Flaws in Digital Education Products for Schoolchildren.”

Data and Transparency

What data should education technology companies and schools collect? What education-related data should the government (federal, state, and local) collect? How long should this data be stored? What policies and practices should be put in place to ensure the privacy and security of this information? What policies and practices should be put in place to ensure transparency? That is, what data do we want released? What should we know – about schools, about teachers, about students, individually and in aggregate? Whose data is forced to be “transparent”? Teachers? Students? Institutions? Ed-tech companies?

There are things we do want to know about students and about schools. There are things we have the right to know. The rate of campus sexual assaults, the rate of campus suicides,graduation rates, suspension and expulsion rates for Black students, for example.

How can we “check the work” of ed-tech’s zany, often misleading marketing promises? How can we “check the work” of schools’ zany, often misleading marketing promises?

How can we “check the work” that’s performed by algorithms in education? By and large, these are proprietary and hidden from view.

Algorithmic Decision-Making and the Future of Education

This fall, I gave a keynote at NWeLearn on “The Algorithmic Future of Education.” In part, it was a look at the history of “robot tutors” and the claims made about the effectiveness of computer-based instruction. As the title suggests, it was also a look forward at how three trends – automation, algorithms, and austerity – might shape the future of education and ed-tech. Swarthmore’s Timothy Burke also identified “algorithmic culture” as something that drives ed-tech visions like AltSchool’s.

Algorithms drive many “adaptive learning” products which make promises, as I’ve described above, that they’re delivering the “perfect bits of content” for each student. In addition to adaptive testing and adaptive textbooks, algorithms are part of other analytics tools that purport to offer better decision-making for students, teachers, and administrators alike.

Civitas Learning, which raised $60 million in venture capital this year, “builds tools that analyze different buckets of data collected at colleges and universities to help administrators, faculty and students make better-informed decisions to boost course completion and, by extension, on-time graduation rates.” It’s not the only player in the market. The Washington Post wrote in June about Virginia Commonwealth University which hired the consulting firm EAB to use predictive analytics to identify which students were most likely to drop out of school. Increasingly, this is the sort of thing that learning management system providers sell, using the data collected there to analyze attendance and grades and to send students or staff members “early warnings.”

In May Inside Higher Ed covered a new app built by Dartmouth College researchers that they said “can predict with great precision the grade point averages of students. The app tracks student behaviors associated with higher or lower GPAs. Students need to report their activities, as the app infers what they are doing and can tell when students are studying, partying or sleeping, among other activities.” Gee, no privacy issues there at all.

From an interview between Evan Selinger and Jeffrey Alan Johnson in The Christian Science Monitor published under the headline “With big data invading campus, universities risk unfairly profiling their students”:

Selinger: Is this [profiling] transparent to students? Do they actually know what information the professor sees?

Johnson: No, not unless the professor tells them. I don’t think students are being told about Stoplight at all. I don’t think students are being told about many of the systems in place. To my knowledge, they aren’t told about the basis of the advising system that Austin Peay put in place where they’re recommending courses to students based, in part, on their likelihood of success. They’re as unaware of these things as the general public is about how Facebook determines what users should see.

Related: “How Facebook’s Algorithm Suppresses Content Diversity (Modestly) and How the Newsfeed Rules Your Clicks” by Zeynep Tufekci. “How Companies Turn Your Facebook Activity Into a Credit Score” by Astra Taylor and Jathan Sadowski. “Credit Scores, Life Chances, and Algorithms” by Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Algorithms discriminate.

So when the New York City schools says that it’s going to adopt the “data tactics used by NYPD to weed out crime” – part of its “broken windows” policing policy – in order to “fix schools,” we should be concerned. Who gets profiled? Which students are seen at risk? Which students are deemed a risk? How are students’ choices circumscribed? How are existing educational inequalities encoded into ed-tech’s algorithms?

As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes,

It is the iron cage in binary code. Not only is our social life rationalized in ways even Weber could not have imagined but it is also coded into systems in ways difficult to resist, legislate or exert political power.

Recommended: Frank Pasquale’s 2015 book The Black Box Society.

A Culture of Surveillance

It’s disheartening to recognize how profiling, tracking, and surveilling students with new technologies fit quite neatly into longstanding practices of the education system. Disheartening, but true.

As such, it’s hardly a surprise to see new technologies marketed to schools in order to (purportedly) curb things like “bad behavior” like cutting class or cheating.

Some schools try to prevent cheating “the old fashioned way” – banning watches during exams, for example. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about University of Chicago professor and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt’s idea to prevent cheating by assigning seats algorithmically, profiling students “deemed most suspicious.” The People’s Daily Online wrote about the usage of drones in China’s Luoyang City to monitor the gaokao exam.

Cheating happens in face-to-face classes, duh. But moving education online seems to elicit fears of even more of it. “Cheating in Online Classes Is Now Big Business,” The Atlantic reported in November.

And in turn, preventing cheating becomes big business – and becomes a potential privacy violation and a security risk as well.

In April, The New York Times’ Natasha Singer covered a growing controversy at Rutgers over ProctorTrack, an “anti-cheating” online testing platform.

“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test.

Once her exam started, Ms. Chao said, a red warning band appeared on the computer screen indicating that Proctortrack was monitoring her computer and recording video of her. To constantly remind her that she was being watched, the program also showed a live image of her in miniature on her screen.

…Proctortrack uses algorithms to detect unusual student behavior – like talking to someone off-screen – that could constitute cheating. Then it categorizes each student as having high or low “integrity.”

The university actually had no written contract with Verificient Technologies, the maker of Proctortrack until seven months into a supposed one-year agreement. When Rutgers finally did receive the contract, among its provisions were the erasure of all student data 90 days after each exam. Gawker wrote in September “Students Wonder When Creepy-As Hell App That Watches Them During Exams Plans on Deleting Their Data.” And the answer seemed to be: after the media started covering the problem.

Others in the online assessment monitoring business: Software Secure’s RPNow (which edX and ASU said they would use for their newly announced Global Freshman Academy); Proctorio, and ProctorU (one of the signers of the Student Privacy Pledge, LOL).

Another type of technology that schools increasingly turn to, in order to prevent cheating and in order to keep schools “safe,” is social media monitoring. As I noted above, I’m going to cover this in the next articles in this series, particularly as it related to free speech issues. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the dust-up this spring surrounding Pearson’s use of monitoring software during the PARCC exams.

In March, former Newark Star-Ledger reporter Bob Braun posted a photo of an email sent by a school superintendent, revealing that Pearson was actively monitoring students’ social media. Cue: panic and mayhem. (I wrote about this at length here on Hack Education.) In his original story, Braun revealed the full details of this (female) superintendent’s name and contact information (phone number and email address). Later that week, in making very spurious connections between a different NJDOE official, Pearson, and the open source database company MongoDB, Braun “doxxed” that (female) NJDOE official. Ah, the irony of using “doxxing” to defend student privacy.

Or maybe that’s just the culture we have now: one of constant surveillance and sousveillance. Or as Siva Vaihyanathan observed, it’s “The Rise of the Cryptopticon”:

Unlike Bentham’s prisoners, we do not know all the ways in which we are being watched or profiled – we simply know that we are. And we do not regulate our behavior under the gaze of surveillance. Instead, we seem not to care. The workings of the Cryptopticon are cryptic, hidden, scrambled, and mysterious. One can never be sure who is watching whom and for what purpose. Surveillance is so pervasive, and much of it seemingly so benign (“for your safety and security”), that it is almost impossible for the object of surveillance to assess how he or she is manipulated or threatened by powerful institutions gathering and using the record of surveillance. The threat is not that expression and experimentation will be quashed or controlled, as they supposedly would have been under the Panopticon. The threat is that subjects will become so inured to and comfortable with the networked status quo that they will gladly sort themselves into “niches” that will enable more effective profiling and behavioral prediction.

The Cryptopticon, not surprisingly, is intimately linked to Big Data. And the dynamic relationship between two has profound effects on the workings of commerce, the state, and society more generally.

The Crypotopticon has profound effects on the workings of education.

Surveillance technologies are becoming ubiquitous at schools and at home, although frequently marketed as “smart” or “connected” which sounds a lot friendlier than “Crypotopticon,” I reckon: It’s not Google Glass (for now at least), but Google gave Carnegie Mellon $500,000 to install sensors all over the campus – “temperature sensors, cameras, microphones, humidity sensors, vibration sensors, and more in order to provide people with information about the physical world around them. Students could determine whether their professors were in their offices, or see what friends were available for lunch.” A “smart campus.” Edsurge offered “A Peek at a ‘Smart’ Classroom Powered by the Internet of Things” in August, highlighting researchers at the University of Belgrade who “used sensors to measure different aspects of the classroom environment – including temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels – and attempted to link these factors to student focus.”

Iris-scanning and other biometric technologies, as well as audio monitoring technologies, were touted for school buses, which are pretty much becoming a roving surveillance system these days.

Districts are adopting body cams for principals and school police officers. The Atlantic reported in July on one district that “spent about $1,100 to purchase 13 cameras at about $85 each. They record with a date and time stamp, can be clipped onto ties or lanyards, and can be turned on and off as needed. For now, they won’t be used to record all interactions with adults.” (That we see a push for body cams on police and body cams on school employees should give us pause about the function of school.)

Video cameras are appearing in more and more classrooms to monitor teachers and students as well. But not just plain ol’ video cameras, oh no: St. Mary’s High School, a Catholic school in St. Louis, said it March it was “upping the game when it comes to school security, becoming one of the first in the nation to install facial recognition cameras.” San Diego Unified School District revealed it was using facial recognition software too. “It’ll Be A Lot Harder To Cut Class With This Classroom Facial-Recognition App” Fast Company wrote in February in a story that raised zero questions about privacy or ethics but noted the app is “unobtrusive.”

In June, Newark Memorial High School in California became the first high school in the US to install “gunshot-sensing technology” which places microphones and sensors in hallways and classrooms. The $15,000 system isn’t designed to record conversations. Mmhmm. Right.

“Meet the Classroom of the Future.” It’s absolutely terrifying.

Or, I think it’s terrifying. Perhaps surveillance has just become normalized.

The Pew Research Center released data from several surveys this year pertaining to data and surveillance. From March: “17% of Americans said they are ‘very concerned’ about government surveillance of Americans’ data and electronic communication; 35% say they are ‘somewhat concerned’; 33% say they are ‘not very concerned’ and 13% say they are ‘not at all’ concerned about the surveillance. …When asked about more specific points of concern over their own communications and online activities, respondents expressed somewhat lower levels of concern about electronic surveillance in various parts of their digital lives.” (emphasis added)

From a survey in May: “93% of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important.”

Even though Pew found that adults value their own privacy, it’s not clear that they believe those same protections should be extended to their children. An op-ed by one parent put it this way: “When it comes to my teens' online activity, safety trumps privacy every time.” The Wall Street Journal published a first person account of a father who digitally surveilled his daughter at college. Truly more disturbing: “The Technology Transhumanists Want in Their Kids.”

This fall, the Future of Privacy Forum released the results of a survey it conducted with parents. The group said the survey showed that “Parents strongly support schools’ collection and use of information they feel appropriately contributes directly to educational purposes.” But it seems more complicated than that. 87% of parents also said they were concerned about student data security. Just 42% said they were comfortable with ed-tech companies having access to students’ education records. Less than a quarter of parents knew about the laws that protect student privacy and restrict access to student data.

Hey parents. Here’s a good place to start thinking about privacy and security: “Keep Your Kid’s Info Safe: Opt Them Out of School Directory Information Sharing.”

“This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record”

“This will go down on your permanent record.” That’s long been the threat from schools, hasn’t it. And now, thanks to all manner of new technologies, the threat seems compounded. The disciplinary data trail is more robust and perhaps even more persistent. There are more possible infractions, more ways to be caught. “The terror of the personal, digital archive is not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us,” writes Navneet Alang, “but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries.” This terror seems particularly inescapable for those growing up online, those incessantly surveilled by the technologies and systems that purport to be guiding them into adulthood. What space will we leave for growth, for vulnerability, for trust?

In education and in society more broadly, we’ve come to confuse surveillance with care. We confuse surveillance with self-knowledge. As Rob Horning wrote earlier this year:

I don’t think self-knowledge can be reduced to matters of data possession and retention; it can’t be represented as a substance than someone can have more or less of. Self-knowledge is not a matter of having the most thorough archive of your deeds and the intentions behind them. It is not a quality of memories, or an amount of data. It is not a terrain to which you are entitled to own the most detailed map. Self-knowledge is not a matter of reading your own permanent record.

And yet the ed-tech industry – its engineers, its investors, its entrepreneurs, its proponents – wants us to believe that this is the case: that more data will provide efficiency, effectiveness.

There was perhaps no better example of this in 2015 than AltSchool – the investment, the uncritical adulation, the compulsion for data, the philosophy (one that Mike Caulfield has called “Dewey plus surveillance.”) AltSchool highlights how easily we confuse “technological progress” with “progressive education” and up with neither. Its founder, Max Ventilla, does not have an teaching background or a research background, but rather a deep faith in the power of data. An NPR story from May described an AltSchool classroom as “outfitted with fisheye-lens cameras, for a 360-degree view at all times, and a sound recorder. And the company is prototyping wearable devices for students with a radio frequency ID tag that can track their movements. Why all the intensive surveillance? Safety and health are two applications, but right now, Ventilla says, it’s mostly R&D. One day, all these data could be continuously analyzed to improve teaching techniques or assess student mastery.” One day…

Surveillance and speculation – the history of the future of education technology.

I'll close with an excerpt from Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski’s keynote “Haunted By Data”:

There’s a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all the data you can, because they have magic algorithms to help you make sense of it.

On the algorithms side, where I live, they tell us not to worry too much about our models, because they have magical data. We can train on it without caring how the process works.

The data collectors put their faith in the algorithms, and the programmers put their faith in the data.

At no point in this process is there any understanding, or wisdom. There's not even domain knowledge. Data science is the universal answer, no matter the question.

Education Politics

More news about the new ESEA keep coming out, now that folks have actually read the bill: “New U.S. education law includes ban on abortion funding by school-based health centers.” There’s the “Pay For Success” initiative, which “allows for private investors to profit from returns on the upfront financing of educational programs, for example, with social impact bonds.”

“The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid is investigating Bridgepoint Education Inc.’s Ashford University over the for-profit college’s marketing practices and other matters,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Via Education Week: “Education Spending Slated for $1.2 Billion Boost in Congressional Budget Deal.” This includes more money for education research.

The EU is considering“introducing a new law which means that anyone under the age of 16 will have to get permission from their parents before accessing the internet.” Good luck with that.

“Education Secretary Nicky Morgan says anyone found running an illegal backstreet school in England will face fines or a prison sentence,” the BBC reports.

The Perkins Loan program will be revived, thanks to a deal struck this week by lawmakers.

Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin has withdrawn his proposal that would strip the state’s college athletes of their scholarships if they participate in protests.

Education in the Courts

Via Inside Higher Ed: “A federal appeals court – lifting a lower court’s injunction – found that the State Technical College of Missouri may make drug testing mandatory for all students.”

Via The New York Times: “A state judge approved a settlement on Wednesday that ends a bitter legal battle over tuition at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, allowing the college to charge students in the short run while developing a plan for returning to its traditional tuition-free model.”

“The Los Angeles police department is moving toward charging celebrated teacher Rafe Esquith with one count of inappropriate touching of a juvenile, LA School Report has learned.”

The American Physical Society has issued a response following Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts’ comments about diversity in the physics classroom, made during the recent oral arguments in Fisher v Texas.

Testing, Testing…

“The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam.”

The World Bank’s Michael Trucano writes about “The introduction of large scale computer adaptive testing in Georgia.”

From the Indy Star: "Scores on thousands of student exams could be incorrect because of a computer malfunction that inadvertently changed grades on Indiana's high-stakes ISTEP test, according to scoring supervisors familiar with the glitch."

“The West Virginia Board of Education voted to replace the state's Common Core-based math and English/language arts standards with revised education requirements, effective next school year,” the Charleston Gazette reports. Students will also take fewer standardized tests in the state.

“Kyoto University to Ban Watches at Entrance Exams,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Via The Atlantic: “A Shifting Education Model in China: An emphasis on success beyond test results takes cues from the U.S. but is only part of the plan to reshape the country's approach to learning.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

The Wall Street Journal looks at the MOOC partnership among Georgia Tech, AT&T, and Udacity. The online CS MS program has 2700+ students, but only 20 have graduated so far. Students are moving through the program more slowly than anticipated seems to be the main “hiccup,” according to the WSJ. Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill writes that the program is “Missing targets but still worth watching.” Me, I want to see more about the demographics of those in this program – who pursues the online MS versus the on campus version? How do job placement rates compare? Are most of those enrolled AT&T employees?

Via SZ International: “MOOCs And Privacy, German Fears About Online Student Data.”

Coursera has released a list of its “most coveted certificates in 2015.” Number one: digital marketing.

Justin Reich and John Hansen write in Mindshift: “What Achieving Digital Equity Using Online Courses Could Look Like.”

Tony Bates writes about “Innovation in online teaching in a Mexican university.”

Meanwhile on Campus

On Tuesday morning, parents, students, and staff of LAUSD woke up to the message that school had been cancelled. The second largest public school system in the US shut all 900 of its campuses following a threat one of its board members received. The threat was eventually found to not be credible, a conclusion that the NYC schools seemed to reach before they made any drastic decisions to close. Via Time: “This L.A. Teacher Fought the Terror Threat by Assigning a Final Exam.” Here’s a copy of the email received by LAUSD.

Gun rights activists staged a “mock mass shooting” near UT Austin. (The counter-protest was larger.)

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “U. of Iowa President Apologizes for Suggesting Unprepared Professors Be Shot.”

Via The Huffington Post: “An Epidemic Of Questionable Arrests By School Police.”

Via The New York Times: “A University of North Texas student holding an ax was fatally shot on Sunday by a campus police officer who was responding to a call about a man knocking out car windows, school and local officials said.”

Colorado College has suspended a student for 6 months for derogatory comments he made on Yik Yak.

Charter network Concept Schools, its contractors, and “many of its privately run, taxpayer-financed charter schools across the Midwest” allegedly tried to defraud the federal E-Rate program, the Chicago Sun Times reports.

Via Fast Company: “College Students Are Renting Out Their Dorm Rooms On Airbnb. What Could Go Wrong?”

Howard University might sell off the rights to its public TV spectrum, The New York Times reports. Howard runs WHUT, the only black-owned public station in the country.

Via Vox: “When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down.” Students were asked to copy the shahada in calligraphy. Parents and the community in Augusta County, Virgina freaked out.

Via The New York Times: “The University of Wisconsin has become the latest university system to officially affirm the right to free speech and academic freedom for all students amid concerns that academia is trying to protect students from being offended by classroom lectures and discussions.”

Via The Atlantic: “Alaska’s Disconnected Schools: On average, K–12 schools have 246 kbps of Internet connectivity – a third of what most people on the mainland U.S. need to stream Netflix.”

Career Education Corporation says it will close all its Le Cordon Bleu schools, citing the new “gainful employment” regulations.

Kaiser Permanente will open a medical school in California.

“The for-profit education company targeting the whole world.” (That’s Laureate Education.)

Bryan Alexander chronicles the “queen sacrifices” at the College of Saint Rose and at Western Illinois University.

“The prestigious St. George’s School in Rhode Island has been investigating what it says are "multiple credible reports" of sexual abuse of students in the 1970s and '80s by three former employees, and said in a statement that its investigation was nearing an end,” The New York Times reports.

Via Edsurge: “BYU’s Bold Plan to Give Students Control of Their Data.”

The charter chain Success Academy is shortening its school day.

Washington state’s first charter school will go back to being a private school, following the decision this year by the state’s Supreme Court that charters are unconstitutional.

Students at DuSable High School in Chicago staged a “read-in” to protest the elimination of the librarian position at their school.

Via ProPublica: “Kids Get Hurt at Residential Schools While States Look On.”

Via The Atlantic: “Where Teachers Are Still Allowed to Spank Students.”

From the HR Department

Wheaton College has placed Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor, on administrative leave following comments she made about Christians and Muslims sharing the same god. More via Inside Higher Ed.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Florida Atlantic University announced Wednesday that it is seeking to fire James Tracy, an associate professor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies. The university’s announcement did not state why it was seeking to dismiss Tracy, who is tenured. But Florida Atlantic has been urged to take action against Tracy – known for denying that many mass shootings are real – by the parents of a boy who was among the victims of the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.”

Education Week asks, “Will ESSA Trigger Significant Layoffs at the Education Department?”

Adjuncts at the LA campus of Emerson College will unionize.

Chicago teachers have voted to call a strike.

Upgrades and Downgrades

“The beleaguered education giant Pearson faces a crisis in its British universities business after it imposed steep price rises on academic libraries. A string of leading universities have stopped buying the FTSE 100 company’s teaching materials in a row over charges for ebooks, The Daily Telegraph has learned. Some top institutions, including Imperial College London, have gone so far as to seek to purge all Pearson materials from their courses, according to publishing industry sources.”

From Desmos (and Dan Meyer): Marbleslides.

The Atlantic on Academia.edu: “The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing.”

Google is launching an ed-tech accelerator program in Brazil.

Google has released some updates to its Classroom product, including the ability to sort by name. Wowza. It’s also updated Course Builder, which now hits v1.10.

Techcrunch examines “the consumerization of edtech.”

Investments

Via The LA Times: “UC officials announced Tuesday the launch of a $250-million venture fund led by entrepreneur Vivek Ranadivé that will invest in innovation from the UC ecosystem.”

Via Buzzfeed: “Investors Rebel Against Controversial Online School Operator K12.”

Via The Washington Post: “Facing new government regulations, Higher One Holdings, one of the country’s largest providers of financial services for college campuses, is selling off its student checking and refund disbursement business to Customers Bancorp.”

“Blackboard CEO Addresses Sale Rumors.”

Apollo Education has acquired Career Partner GmbH for $105 million.

Chinese online education platform Xioazhan Jiaoyu has raised $84 million from Sequoia Capital, Vision Knight Capital, GGV Capital, Milestone Capital and Shunwei Capital Partners, and Bertelsmann Asia Investment.

Test prep company Raungguru has raised a “seven figure” round of funding from Venturra Capital and East Ventures.

Allovue has raised $5.1 million in funding from Rethink Education. Red House Education, Serious Change II, Kapor Capital, and Baltimore Angels. The startup, which sells accounting software to schools, has raised $6.9 million total.

Test prep company MasteryPrep has raised $3.6 million in (debt and equity) funding from the Catalyst Group, Liquid Ventures, Jennifer and Sean Reilly, Maple Leaf, the Frazer family, and Advantage Capital.

Sliderule has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Allen Blue (co-founder of LinkedIn), John Katzmann (founder of The Princeton Review and 2U), 500 Startups, Blue Fog Capital, and “several other company founders,” says Edsurge. The company, which offers PD in data science, will change its name to Springboard.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“Coming To Texas: Special-Ed Cams To Protect Students From Their Own Teachers.”

“Police in England said they arrested a 21-year-old man on Tuesday in connection with last month’s breach of VTech, a Hong Kong electronic toy maker, which exposed personal data for 12 million people, including 6.4 million minors,” The New York Times reports.

Data and “Research”

According to analysis published in Inside Higher Ed, there’s been “a steady rise in the proportion of college graduates paying too high a percentage of their annual income to repay student loan debt.”

Via Pacific Standard: “Mustaches Outnumber Women in Med School Leadership.”

The latest research from Pew: “Gaming and Gamers.” (Related from Education Dive: “Learning games have Ed Dept’s attention, but is it warranted?”)

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The several-year decline in enrollment in American colleges and universities continued and arguably intensified this fall, driven by sharp dips in numbers of students at for-profit colleges, full-time students at community colleges and students aged 24 or more, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.” Bryan Alexander and “Dean Dad” Matt Reed respond to the news.

The US high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high.

2016 predictions: It’ll be the “Year of Agency” according to Education Week blogger Beth Holland.

This is the eighth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

As long as I’ve written these year-in-review stories, starting back in 2010, I’ve noted some of the tensions surrounding social media and schools. On one hand, social media gets touted as facilitating “connected” or “social” learning, “personal learning networks,” and the like. On the other hand, social media is still viewed with suspicion. Sites are blocked on some school networks; some schools ban students and teachers from interacting online; and some schools monitor what students and staff say online. (Some students and staff monitor one another as well, sharing emails, videos, images via social media in turn.)

So like many of the topics I write about in this series, it would be easy to say that not much has changed when it comes to social media and schools. But to do so would ignore one of the most important trends in education: the powerful resurgence of campus activism. This activism is deeply intertwined with social media – in terms of organizing, documenting, and spreading messages – and with concerns about attacks on free speech.

Who’s Using Social Media?

The Pew Research Center released several reports on social media in 2014: on mobile messaging, on parents’ use of social media, and on teens’ usage.

In a report (PDF) that provides an overview of social media usage, published in October, the organization said that “Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites, up from 7% when Pew Research Center began systematically tracking social media usage in 2005.” When looking at adults’ usage, there are small differences in the rate at which men and women and at which different racial and ethnic groups use social media: 68% of women, 62% of men, 65% of whites, 65% of Hispanics and 56% of African-Americans use social media today. Those who live in urban areas, with higher education levels, and with higher household income are more likely to use social media. Young adults, between the age of 18 and 29, are the most likely to use social media – 90% of them do.

Facebook is still the most popular social media site, used by 72% of Internet-using adults (that is, about 62% of all American adults). But the growth of Facebook has plateaued. Growing in popularity are messaging apps like Snapchat that delete messages, as well as image-heavy sites like Instagram and Pinterest.

Facebook remains the most popular social media site for teens too, used by 71%. It’s the one they say they visit most frequently as well. As with adults, Snapchat and Instagram are popular among 13 to 17 year olds. According to Pew, boys are more likely than girls to say they visit Facebook regularly; girls are more likely than boys to say they use Instagram. Snapchat is used more often by wealthier teens.

But all in all, Pew found that “92% of teens report going online daily – including 24% who say they go online ‘almost constantly.’” “African-American and Hispanic youth report more frequent internet use than white teens. Among African-American teens, 34% report going online ‘almost constantly’ as do 32% of Hispanic teens, while 19% of white teens go online that often.”

Recommended reading: danah boyd with “An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media.”

But even if social media has seen widespread adoption by adults and teens alike, it still faces obstacles to being used at school. eSchool News reported in May about the number of efforts made by districts across the US to restrict the contact that teachers and students have with one another. So the results of a University of Phoenix survey released in September probably shouldn’t be a surprise: just 13% of teachers use social media in the classroom. To be clear, it’s not that they don’t use social media at all – 78% of them said they do for personal use. But the survey found a great deal of reluctance to using it for professional purposes – to communicate with students or with parents, for example. In fact, that reluctance has increased over the past few years, Education Week noted.

Social Media Surveillance

The reluctance for teachers to adopt social media might reflect a belief that seems to persist at school: that students using social media are simply up to no damn good. They use it for cheating. They use it for sexting. They use it for bullying. They’re distracted by it. And on and on.

States and districts have taken differing approaches to students’ social media accounts. In January, The Washington Post examined a new law in Illinois that would require students hand over their social media passwords if their school has reason to believe that their social media accounts have evidence she or he violated a school policy. Even if it’s posted at home, after school hours. In October, Education Week reported that, “Wyoming could become one of the first states to institute broad protections for students unwilling to give school officials access to their social media accounts.”

Many schools have also turned to social media monitoring tools that analyze all public status updates across various platforms. The Orlando Sentinel reported in May that “What Orange County students – and staff – post on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is now being monitored by their school district to ‘ensure safe school operations.’” Ensuring “safe school operations,” of course, gives schools a very broad mandate.

As I noted in the previous article in this series, Pearson’s use of social media monitoring during the Common Core exams – ostensibly to curb cheating – attracted a fair amount of negative publicity. But to be fair to Pearson, this is something that most corporations probably now do – they’re monitoring us to protect their brands.

In the UK, it was less concerns about cheating than “extremism” that was offered as the justification for surveilling students’ online activity. Al Jazeera reported in October that

Schoolchildren in the UK who search for words such as “caliphate” and the names of Muslim political activists on classroom computers risk being flagged as potential supporters of terrorism by monitoring software being marketed to teachers to help them spot students at risk of radicalisation.

The “radicalisation keywords” library has been developed by the software company Impero as an add-on to its existing Education Pro digital classroom management tool to help schools comply with new duties requiring them to monitor children for “extremism”, as part of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy.

To be fair, this surveillance isn’t just a practice undertaken by K–12 schools. Students in college also found themselves in trouble for things they posted online. A student at the University of Tulsa was suspended over offensive Facebook posts (made by his husband), for example. The Kansas Court of Appeals reversed the University of Kansas’s decision to expel a student for tweets he made about his ex-girlfriend.

The Trouble with Yik Yak

Without any doubt the most controversial piece of education technology in 2015 was Yik Yak. (And yes, I know that it’s probably controversial too to label it as “ed-tech.”) Certainly it was the one most frequently written about as everyone from The New York Times to Inside Higher Ed to The Pacific Standard to the Guelph Mercury weighed in on the havoc that Yik Yak has wreaked.

Yik Yak is part of a broader trend in tech, no doubt: the rise of anonymous messaging apps. When I wrote about data and privacy last year, I observed that “In light of all this surveillance at home and at school, it seems quite noteworthy to see the adoption of these apps by students.” This year: same as it ever was, I suppose. Except this year both campus administrators and law enforcement pushed back, demanding in several highly publicized cases that Yik Yak hand overdata about its users. (Spoiler alert: anonymous messaging apps mostly aren’t.)

In conjunction with some of the other events that I’ll explore here, Yik Yak became a major site of conflict and harassment on many campuses. It announced at the beginning of the year that it would improve the process for reporting abusive posts, but that hardly stopped them from being posted in the first place.

Students were suspended at several universities for making “hurtful comments” and for making threats using the tool. Colleges struggled to address Yik Yak; of course, they struggled to address the issues that Yik Yak tended to underscore: rampant racism, homophobia, and misogyny on campus, for example. In October, “72 women’s and civil rights organizations urged the U.S. Education Department to tell colleges that they must monitor anonymous apps like Yik Yak – frequently the source of sexist and racist comments about named or identifiable students – and do something to protect those students who are named. The groups said they view anonymous online abuse as an emerging issue under provisions of the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.”

Via Vox’s Libby Nelson: “Colleges’ Yik Yak problem, explained.”

Yik Yak is not the only app like it on the market or even the most highly funded. It’s raised $73.5 million total. If you’re talking messaging apps more generally, that amount puts it far behind Snapchat, which has raised $1.17 billion. One of these companies’ competitors in the anonymous messaging app market, Secret, did shut down this year, after raising $37 million.

Another app worth noting for its popularity among teens: Jott, which works without a data plan or WiFi connection. The app uses a mesh network instead, making it useful for those teens who don’t have a data plan on their mobile device and allowing them to bypass some of the filters and blocks that school networks have in place.

Social Media Sousveillance

As all the social media monitoring underscores, there’s already plenty of surveillance on school campuses. But the ubiquity of mobile devices has also create opportunities for students surveil back, to record videos of one another, faculty, and staff.

A number of notable cases this year: video of University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members singing a racist chant, prompting the school to sever ties with the organization and expel two of students. Kennesaw State University apologized in June after a student made a video of him attempting to meet with an academic advisor (and being accused of harassment for doing so). In October, a student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina videotaped a school resource officer violently throwing a fellow student, a young Black woman to the ground, purportedly because she refused to comply quickly enough to her teacher’s demand she put her phone away. Both students in that case were arrested. The video – horrific – went viral. Ben Fields, the sheriff’s deputy, was subsequently fired.

Free Speech and Job Security

There was some resolution this year to one of the big cases of free speech and social media from 2014: Steven Salaita’s firing by the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. That was when the university withdrew an offer of employment for the Native American Studies professor following tweets he made about the Israel and Gaza.

“Why I Was Fired” by Steven Salaita.

In January, Salaita filed a lawsuit against the university – its administrators, trustees, and donors. UIUC soughtseveral times to have the lawsuit dismissed. The university was forced to release emails pertaining to Salaita’s employment (and from those we learned that UI chancellor Phyllis Wise had used her personal email account to try to avoid scrutiny as the school made its decision to rescind the job offer. Wise resigned shortly afterward). In November, the university paid $875,000 to settle the case.

Salaita was far from the only tenured professor who lost a job for something she or he posted online. He was far from the only one who found his job threatened this year, despite the supposed strong tradition of “academic freedom” in higher ed.

An incomplete list:

In January, Tim McGettigan, a sociology professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, filed a lawsuit against the school for violating his free speech rights, charging that the university blocked his computer access after he tried to organize protests in response to planned layoffs. Also in January, Marquette University grad student Cheryl Abbate wrote about what she experienced following a blog post by professor John McAdams criticizing how she handled a discussion of gay marriage in one of her classes. Marquette University took to revoke the tenure and fire McAdams. Northwestern University Laura Kipnis was investigated this spring for an essay she published that defended the right of professors to “hook up” with students. (She was cleared of any wrongdoing.) In May, Saida Grundy, an incoming professor at Boston University, found herself in hot water over comments she made on Twitter about white privilege. In July, there were rumors (false) that the University of Memphis had fired Zandria Robinson for comments she’d made on Twitter. Also in July, tweets from University of Wisconsin Madison professor Sara Goldrick-Rab stirred up controversy. The University Committee issued a statement condemning her, but the Faculty Senate said there would be no disciplinary action taken.

(In many cases, the professors who found themselves in trouble for their blog posts and Tweets were targeted by the conservative news site Campus Reform, which The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed “Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine.”)

Goldrick-Rab’s tweets were a commentary on the moves by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to end tenure in the state (in part she urged incoming students to avoid the school); and I think all these concerns about academic freedom and faculty activism and/or misbehavior cannot be separated from the political climate that Walker’s efforts exist in – a belief that professors, like students, cannot be trusted.

Recommended reading: “Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions” by Tressie McMillan Cottom.

There was a lot of handwringing this year about threats to free speech, but there wasn’t necessarily a lot of critical reflection about who gets to speak and who gets punished for it. A growing intolerance to free speech – the work those darn “language police” as Jonathan Chait described it in January – has lead to a “great renaissance of public shaming” that is “sweeping our land” thanks to social media. That’s the argument of Jon Ronson’s 2015 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which tried to push this narrative (one that Jacqui Shine masterfully dismantled in her review of the book).

Power matters. It matters when it comes to faculty speech. It matters when it comes to students'.

Campus Protests

It’s been five years now since Malcolm Gladwell published his article in The New Yorker arguing that “the revolution will not be tweeted.” Social media is built on “weak ties,” he argued, and therefore could never become powerful enough to make substantive social change. Others have lambasted and derided “hashtag activism” since then. I’d like to think that #BlackLivesMatter is proving them wrong, particularly with the role that Black students have played in “reinvigorating” campus activism.

From The Atlantic, “Campus Politics: A Cheat Sheet.” As that article highlights, there have been major protests across many, many universities this year (in the US and elsewhere). Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Amherst. Claremont McKenna College. University of Cincinnati. The University of Missouri. Protests have occurred at high schools too: in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Seattle, and elsewhere.

“Student Activism Is Serious Business,” author Roxane Gay wrote this fall. Indeed, the protests have drawn attention to racial inequalities, police violence, punitive educational practices and, according to The New York Times, these might play a role in the Supreme Court decision in the Fisher v Texas case. Certainly the Justices’ comments and questions during oral arguments underscored the biases that run throughout US institutions.

I don’t want to commit the inverse of Gladwell’s error here. That is, I don’t want to suggest that social media is the reason for this renewed activism; that it’s the glue that gives #BlackLivesMatter (or any other political hashtag) its solidarity or a technology that gives it its fuel.

But when I look back over the events that occurred at the University of Missouri in November, for example, it’s pretty striking to see how social media and the tools I’ve written about here – Twitter, cellphone videos, Yik Yak, and the like – have helped to elevate the public’s awareness of the racist climate on campuses and have helped students across campuses to share strategies and support. Social media might not drive activism, but it certainly shapes what and how we know about political events, particularly as the national media dismisses certain stories as merely “local interest.”

(Think: #IStandwithAhmed. Think: #CharlestonSyllabus. Think: #FeesMustFall. Etc.)

Throughout the fall, students at Mizzzou grew more and more frustrated by the administration’s lack of response to several racist incidents: Peyton Head, the president of Missouri Students Association, was called racist slurs when he walked across campus, for example. In October, Concerned Student 1950, a student group named for the year the first Black graduate student who was admitted to the university, staged a protest at the homecoming parade, confronting the car of university president Tim Wolfe. The car bumped into one of the protesters, graduate student Jonathan Butler. At the end of October, a swastika drawn in human feces was discovered at a residence hall. On November 2, Butler began a hunger strike.

On November 7, the Legion of Black Collegians posted a photograph to Twitter of some 30 football players linking arms with Butler. “The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” read the message accompanying the photo. “We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences.” (The tweet was retweeted 3000 times.) The next day, the school’s football coach Gary Pinkel tweeted a photo of he and his team arm in arm, “The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players.” (This was retweeted 15,000 times.)

On November 9, Wolfe resigned. (The Nation’s Dave Zirin offered “3 Lessons from the University of Missouri President Tom Wolfe’s Resignation.”)

The protests continued, as did threats of violence against student protestors via social media. (Two white students from nearby colleges werearrested for threats they’d posted to Yik Yak.) Fearing for their safety, some students asked to have classes cancelled, and a screenshot of a rather unsympathetic email from a professor who refused to do so went viral, also thanks to Twitter.

As journalists flooded the campus to report on the protests, they came in conflict with some students, who were reluctant to have all of their demonstrations and meetings filmed and who wanted a “no media safe space.” Again, cellphone video went viral, this time showing a professor calling for “muscle” to block reporters from filming.

As it’s wont to do, the media quickly reframed the story to be about itself, to be about free speech – a “diversion,” as Jelani Cobb suggested in The New Yorker – and the spotlight on campus racism threatened to be lost in the narrative that the press and pundits were happily formulating: that there’s a growing illiberalism on campus, that political correctness is running amok.

If not for the revival of campus activism this fall, I think the focus of that narrative would have been on “trigger warnings.” My god, there were so many op-eds written this year about trigger warnings, and I confess I didn’t keep track of them, as most – not all– tended to dismiss students’ experiences and students’ pain. Based on the frequency with which they came up, you’d think they were on the top of almost every syllabus. But according to a survey conducted by the National Coalition Against Censorship, trigger warnings are neither widely used by professors nor widely demanded by students. But again, stories about trigger warnings fit a certain narrative that students are refusing to listen to ideas that they find uncomfortable or that they disagree with. Even President Obama suggested students were “coddled.” No doubt, there were a handful episodes – again, often drawn from a student’s update on social media– that went viral, such as a story from Duke about freshmen's purported refusal to read Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home.

Recommended reading: Aaron Bady’s “Against Student Stories.”

CUNY’s Angus Johnston has recently published an article in Rolling Stone that summarizes the campus activism of 2015 much better than I have here. “There’s No College P.C. Crisis,” he argues. There are nonetheless a number of crises that schools do face: ongoing struggles over free speech, tenure, academic freedom, labor, racism, misogyny, violence, and so on. It seems likely that we’ll see all of this continue to play out – and play out on social media – in the coming year.

This is the ninth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Here’s what I wrote last year when I chose “the Indie Web” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014”:

This is an aspirational post. After some 35,000 words in a series that has been pretty critical about the state of education technology in 2014, I want to write about something that gives me hope. I believe we can do better.

I mean, what does an alternative to ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering look like? What does resistance to the buzzwords and the bullshit look like?

I don’t have an answer. (There isn’t an answer.) But I think we can see a glimmer of possibility in the Indie Web Movement. It’s enough of a glimmer that I’m calling it a trend. It’s my year-end series; I’ll do what I want.

Amen to all that (although for those keeping score at home, this year’s series so far weighs in at around 54,000 words).

When I chose to write about the “Indie Web” last year, I purposefully wanted to distinguish it from other “learn-to-code” efforts (which as I’ve argued elsewhere are more about what employers want than they are about what students need). That being said, the Indie Web does demand people learn more about how the technologies they utilize actually work. The Indie Web movement in particular wants people to become creators not simply consumers of Web technologies and in the process to think more carefully about what happens to their digital creations and to their digital public spaces – what happens to content, what happens to data. The principles of IndieWebCamp, which I cited last year too, are pretty key here:

Your content is yours. When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users' data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected. Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control. You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

The Indie Web posits itself as an alternative to the corporate Web, but it is a powerful alternative to much of ed-tech as well, which as this series has once again highlighted, is quite committed to controlling and monetizing students’ and teachers’ connections, content, and data.

This year, I’ve changed the title slightly, from “Indie Web” to “Indie Ed-Tech.” I’ve done so because I want to extend my analysis beyond the Web, as a tech or as an idea. Nevertheless, much of what I plan to highlight in this article remains the same as what I wrote about last year: indie ed-tech underscores the importance of students and scholars alike controlling their intellectual labor and their data; it questions the need for VC-funded, proprietary tools that silo and exploit users; it challenges the centrality of the LMS in all ed-tech discussions and the notion that there can be one massive (expensive) school-wide system to rule them all; it encourages new forms of open, networked learning that go beyond the syllabus, beyond the campus. It’s not only a different sort of infrastructure, it’s a different sort of philosophy than one sees promoted by Silicon Valley – by the ed-tech industry or the (ed-)tech press.

One thing I found striking when I began working on this article was that almost none of the sources were trade magazines. These just aren’t the kinds of stories that Wired or Techcrunch or Edsurge tend to write about. Instead the sources I’ve drawn on here are primarily blog posts written by instructional designers and professors and entrepreneurs and published on their own websites.

See, there’s a world of fascinating and innovative things happening in ed-tech. (Or at least there are pockets of rebels scattered across the Pacific Northwest, in the mountains of Italy, in Bristol, in Fredericksburg, in Wagga Wagga, and elsewhere…) You just need to look beyond the industry PR.

Ed-Tech as a Reclamation Project

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, but fears about its future continue, particularly due threats from government surveillance, corporate tech silos, and censorship by both governments and tech companies. (Some tried to argue this year that ad-blockers are breaking the Web. But I think ads were probably the Web’s original sin.)

The Web is dead. Long live the Web. Blogging is dead. Long live blogging. “All My Blogs Are Dead.” “All Our Academic Websites, Also Dead.”

Yes, despite all the caution and concern about “a world that no longer forgets,” the Web is actually quite fragile, in part because we continue to post content to sites that we do not control. This impermanence has major ramifications for scholarship.

“The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.” – Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde

To push back against the brokenness of the Internet is daunting. It probably involves, as Sunde argues, dismantling global capitalism. To push back against the brokenness of ed-tech is challenging in its own right, no doubt. 2015 was a record-setting year for ed-tech investment – I’ll cover this in more depth in the last article in this series – and all that venture capital is accompanied by powerful narratives that encourage, among other things, pervasive data extraction, automation, and algorithmic decision-making.

But the “indie-ness” of indie ed-tech isn’t simply a matter of the technology or the business model.

Indie ed-tech does strive to offer something different in both those cases. At its core, it supports students and teachers and schools in managing their own infrastructure, their own labor, their own data. And so if there is a “Web we have to save,” it should be because there is a “Web we need to give to students.”

Gratuitous self promotion: I wrote a book on this topic this year titled Claim Your Domain – And Own Your Online Presence.

One of the cornerstones of indie ed-tech has long been the Domain of One’s Own initiative at the University of Mary Washington, which gives Web domains along with pedagogical and technical support to students and faculty. The domains are theirs, not the school’s.

DTLT (the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies) at UMW experienced a significant shake-up this year,when Jim Groom submitted his resignation in order to work full-time at Reclaim Hosting. There he joined former DTLT-er Tim Owens at their new startup, one that offers hosting and support services for other schools and teachers to run similar “Domain of One’s Own”-ish efforts. In September, UMW announced Groom’s replacement: Jesse Stommel who left the University of Wisconsin Madison to become the new executive director of DTLT. (Stommel’s thoughts on “Leaving Wisconsin.”) Also joining DTLT: Lee Skallerup Bessette. With these hires, it appears that DTLT will remain a site of important, student-centered (feminist!) ed-tech innovation.

Often when I write about the importance of the “Domain of One’s Own” initiative, someone will sneer “but it’s just a blog.” Or when I write about the significance of Reclaim Hosting, someone will argue that “hosting is not innovative at all.” These responses miss the point of what sets these indie ed-tech efforts apart – technologically and philosophically. They fail to recognize the importance of networked scholarship, for starters, but they also tend to give too much weight to theories about “disruptive innovation” and the ed-tech industry’s own descriptions and expectations of what that looks like.

Towards a “Personal Cyberinfrastructure”

Indie ed-tech isn’t just about “blogging,” of course. And it isn’t just about “blogging” as a replacement for closed and/or proprietary tools like learning management systems and e-portfolios. It’s not just about annotation, and it’s not just about commenting – but maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope, thanks to Indie Web startups like Known and Hypothes.is, that these too can be “reclaimed” for education purposes, again under the control of learners and scholars themselves and not under the control of companies that want our data in order to build their algorithms.

“Blogging” tools might be poised to become something new in their own right – that’s one possible result of the latest WordPress.com management system, Calypso, some contended when it was released this fall. “Calypso is the Future of Personal Cyberinfrastructure,” Washington State University’s Mike Caulfield argued.

“Personal cyberinfrastructure” is a foundational concept for indie ed-tech. This involves the decentralization of ed-tech, as the locus of control is less the institution and its software systems than it is the individual. This shift (ideally) offers the individual better control of one’s data – via an “API of one’s own,” perhaps – as well as better construction of the community with which she or he is learning. It moves the individual (ideally) beyond the “default settings” of software that restrict us to a “templated self.”

These sorts of experiments with “personal cyberinfrastructure” are underway not just at the University of Mary Washington, but at Davidson College, the University of Oklahoma, Brigham Young University, and elsewhere – including high schools.

This remain crucial: “personal cyberinfrastructure” mustn’t be unwieldy. It shouldn’t be too complex. That’s a huge challenge.

The arc of the ed-tech universe is long and it bends towards the bloated LMS.

Ideally, indie ed-tech should be SPLOT: the “Simplest/Smallest Possible/Portable Learning/Latest Online/Open Tools/Technologies.” It should be MYOS: make your own stuff/mind your own stuff/manage your own stuff/my online self/my operating system. We still have a ways to go. Like I said, this is an aspirational post.

Rethinking the Web

Mike Caulfield continued his work throughout the year on the Federated Wiki technology and its usage in education. It’s not been an easy concept or tool for folks to grasp, and one of the latest iterations now involves taking some of the ideas about federation, wiki-ness, and forking and applying these to WordPress– the most popular CMS and as such one that a lot of folks are familiar if not comfortable with. Caulfield calls this new project “Wikity.”

…It’s exactly the model that Downes and Siemens advanced all those years ago in the first cMOOCs: “Aggregate - Remix - Repurpose - Feed Forward.” But the tools used there – wiki, blogs, etc – were, in my opinion, not as well suited to the cycle as they might have been, at least for certain types of endeavors. Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals.

In working on Wikity, as well as on a keynote he delivered at the dLRN conference this fall, Caulfield has outlined some of the most thought-provoking ideas about how we might rethink the Web and ed-tech’s position on it. This isn’t a matter of restoring the Web under the auspices of a nostalgia for “the Web we lost,” although it does include a nod to a much earlier vision, that of Vannevar Bush and his Memex. “In the world of the Memex your space houses things useful to you, and the space of a literate person includes many things one disagrees with but finds useful to think with,” Caulfield imagines. So how do we build tools that meet the needs of progressive, networked teaching and learning rather than trying to tweak the Web (and the increasingly powerful social media stream) that we’ve inherited?

Caulfield’s keynote: “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.”

“Open”

Based on the blog posts that emerged from the OpenEd conference in Vancouver in November, there seemed to be a rift (or rifts, more accurately) between and among those in open education. “What counts as ‘open’?” is a question that’s long been up for debate. This year another key one emerging from the conference seemed to be “are open textbooks the right place to focus?” Are “open textbooks” indie (or indie enough)? Is “open” challenging the educational status quo enough?

Open educational resources and open textbooks have, without a doubt, continued to push into the mainstream. (From David Wiley: “The Practical Cost of Textbooks” and why this issue, indie or not, remains important.)

Updates from open textbook initiatives: Virginia’s community college system announced in May more funding for an open textbook initiative, modeled on Tidewater Community College’s “Z-Degree.” Manitoba announced an Open Textbook Initiative in September, one that will create a library of free and openly licensed textbooks for the province’s most highly enrolled college classes. In November, Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute and Lumen Learning announced a partnership to publish 24 online college courses, based on OER, for two complete degree programs. An update on British Columbia’s open textbook project, penned by Tony Bates in November, notes that the project has resulted in an estimated savings for students of between $927,200 and $1,204,762. (Another update from Bates earlier this year: the cost of developing an open textbook is $80,000 - $130,000).

OER even found support at the federal level in 2015, with the US Department of Education hiring Andy Marcinek in September to be its first ever “open education adviser” and proposing in October a new regulation that would require any new intellectual property developed with its grant funds to be openly licensed.

Of course, if the feds embracing OER doesn’t make you question the indie cred of “open,” then ed-tech companies’ use of the word “open” just might. Case in point: McGraw-Hill and Microsoft announced this spring that they “embrace open learning,” according to a headline in the Ed-Tech Magazine at least. The story contained the phrase “compound learning object,” to which David Wiley responded with a little history lesson about learning objects and the Reusability Paradox.

(Not everyone is into open-washing, oh no. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Chief Content Officer published some sponsored content in Wired: “Why Free Is Not the Future of Digital Content in Education.”)

The prize for the most questionable act in open education in 2015 might just go to the University of Guelph which attempted this summer to trademark“OpenEd.” Thankfully the university responded to the outrage that ensued and backed down, saying it would release its claim (but noting that there was nothing now to stop others from trying to trademark them term). Rolin Moe responded to the trademark issue, highlighting some of the issues that seemed to be display – again – following OpenEd this fall: what are our assumptions about “open”?

Recommended reading: “Reflections on Open Education and the Path Forward” by David Wiley.

Punk’s Not Dead…

Edupunk was declared dead almost as soon as it burst on the scene way back in 2008. So it goes, I suppose. But there’s something about Edupunk that persists in the pockets of indie ed-tech: a resistance to the mainstream ed-tech industry, suspicion about institutional power, a DIY sensibility. From “The Indie Ed-Tech Movement” by that O.G. edupunk himself, Jim Groom writes that 1980s indie punk

provides an interesting parallel for what we might consider Indie Edtech. Indie punk represents a staunchly independent, iconoclastic, and DIY approach to music which encompasses many of the principles we aspired to when creating open, accessible networks for teaching and learning at UMW. Make it open source, cheap, and true alternatives to the pre-packaged learning management systems that had hijacked innovation. The rise of the venture capital xMOOCs only reinforced that value of such an ethos.

(See also: “Indie Music and Ed-Tech (or Indie Ed-Tech)” by Adam Croom.)

A lot of the technology is in place to achieve the goals of indie ed-tech. What’s a harder sell: changing the culture– among institutions, industry, and individuals – to support these goals. It’s the culture as much as it is the technology that gives us the very dystopian ed-tech I’ve written about throughout this series: the penchant for surveillance, for exploitation, for efficiency, for viewing students as objects and not as subjects of their own education.

We don't simply need to rethink education technology; we need to rethink "school."

If I could choose one blog post from the year that shows us an alternative path forward for education and for ed-tech, it would be “Not Yetness” by Amy Collier. Emerging technologies need not necessarily be “indie,” but the concept of emergence as explained by Collier is messy enough to be hard for institutions or industry to co-opt, standardize, monetize:

In our context, emergence is allowing new ideas, new methodologies, new findings, new ways of learning, new ways of doing, and new synergies to emerge and to have those things continue to feed back into more emergence. Emergence is a good thing. For us, not-yetness is the space that allows for emergence. Not-yetness is not satisfying every condition, not fully understanding something, not check-listing everything, not tidying everything, not trying to solve every problem… but creating space for emergence to take us to new and unpredictable places, to help us better understand the problems we are trying to solve

…This is becoming increasingly important in education, where the rhetoric surrounding educational technology pushes simplification, ease, efficiency, and measurable-everything. This rhetoric goes hand-in-hand with the accountability movements (many call it “evidence-based practice”) at play in educational contexts.

To resist the compulsion for data, to resist the big business of ed-tech, we need more “indie,” more agitation, more care, and much more not-yetness. And this resistance is happening…

This is the tenth and final article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Who’s Funded/Who’s Funding

In February of this year, Techcrunch, one of the original Silicon Valley-focused tech blogs, looked back on venture funding during 2014 and pronounced that an ed-tech investment revival was underway. But by June, Techcrunch had changed its tune, proclaiming that funding for ed-tech startups was drying up: “Investors Rethink EdTech As Dealflow Declines.”

2015 has actually been a record-setting year for ed-tech investment if you look at the total dollar figures. Investment analyst firm CB Inights wrote this summer (just a month after Techcrunch’s doom-filled article) that “the period from 2010 to 2014 saw more than a 503% growth in investment dollars.”

“Ka-ching!” – Edsurge

What’s striking to me isn’t so much that Techcrunch got it right or wrong when it looked at investment numbers from the first half of the year and extrapolated what was happening in the sector. What’s interesting, I think, is that, with all the data at its disposal, this is the narrative that Techcrunch chose to tell: one of wariness, hesitancy. Like many industry observers – investors and journalists alike – Techcrunch appears ready for the ed-tech boom to turn to ed-tech bust once again. You can sense it in their commentary: education is a really “tough space.”

Techcrunch is also the owner of Crunchbase, a crowdsourced database that tracks who in the technology sector has received venture funding. (More accurately, I suppose, Techcrunch and Crunchbase are owned by AOL.) Crunchbase is not a perfect record; as I said, it’s crowdsourced, relying on entrepreneurs and analysts entering funding data in order to keep it up-to-date. But the data on Crunchbase is freely available. And that does set it apart from many other venues that charge for the data and the analysis about investments. (Like this one, for example: market research firm MarketsandMarkets claimed this summer that “the global Education Technology (Ed Tech) and Smart Classrooms Market is expected to grow from USD 43.27 Billion in 2015 to USD 93.76 Billion in 2020.” But the report will cost you almost $5000, so all I can really say is that the market for selling data about ed-tech remains strong.)

Me, I want to be able to see the data itself.

At the beginning of the year, I started to keep track of all the funding reports news I came across. I wanted to make this data openly available in turn. (You can find the site and the GitHub repo that powers it at matrix.hackeducation.com.) It’s important to “show your work” when it comes to these sorts of reports, I believe, because the figures and the analyses from various sources always differ wildly. This is partly based on “what counts” as ed-tech. Again, it’s not so much a matter of right or wrong; it’s more the kind of narrative that frames or is framed by the data.

My calculations differ from, say, Edsurge’s, which recently published its look back at funding in 2015 for US startups. Here’s its list of the “Top 10 US edtech deals in 2015”:

1. HotChalk ($230 million)
2. Lynda.com ($186 million)
3. Udacity ($105 million)
4. AltSchool ($100 million)
5. General Assembly ($70 million)
6. Udemy ($65 million)
7. Coursera ($61.1 million)
8. Civitas Learning ($60 million)
9. Varsity Tutors ($50 million)
10. Duolingo and Sphero (tied with $45 million each)

Here’s my list of the 20 biggest deals this year:

1. Social Finance ($1 billion)
2. Earnest ($275 million)
3. HotChalk ($230 million)
4. Social Finance ($200 million)
5. TutorGroup ($200 million)
6. Lynda.com ($186 million)
7. Hujang.com ($157 million)
8. Udacity ($105 million)
9. 17zuoye and AltSchool (tied with $100 million each)
10. Xioazhan Jiaoyu ($84 million)
11. General Assembly ($70 million)
12. Udemy ($65 million)
13. Yuantiku ($60 million)
14. Civitas Learning ($60 million)
15. NetDragon Education ($52.5 million)
16. Genshuixue and Varsity Tutors (tied with $50 million each)
17. Coursera ($49.5 million)
18. Knewton ($47.25 million)
19. Ortbotix and Duolingo (tied with $45 million each)
20. LittleBits ($44.2 million)

My list includes investments outside the US – doing so highlights the booming market in China. Mine also includes Social Finance and Earnest, two companies that specialize in private student loans. While Edsurge says it’s excluding those that aren’t focused on “learner outcomes,” I think it’s important to recognize investors’ interest in the student loan sector, particularly as these companies increasingly partner with coding bootcamps.

These numbers demonstrate that there were some giant funding rounds this year. (When Lynda.com announced its $186 million round in January, it was hailed as the largest the sector had seen in the past five years.) As Edsurge notes in its analysis of the year’s funding, these big numbers do skew things: “These record-setting numbers may be deceptive as a large percentage of funding is concentrated among a small number of companies.”

Edsurge finds that seed and angel rounds of funding have increased in size and number, but it notes that the number of Series A and B rounds has fallen. “This increase suggests that investors are becoming more reluctant to invest in Series B deals,” it says (echoing what Techcrunch observed in June), adding that this might be “a symptom, perhaps, of early investor darlings’ seeming failure to establish a core business model?” Perhaps.

Here’s my list of the most well-funded education technology startups:

1. Social Finance ($1.37 billion)
2. TutorGroup ($315 million)
3. Earnest ($299.1 million)
4. HotChalk ($235 million)
5. Hujang.com ($187 million)
6. D2L ($165 million)
7. Pluralsight ($162.5 million)
8. Udacity ($160 million)
9. Coursera ($146.1 million)
10. 17zuoye ($135 million)

Again, this list differs quite a bit with one that The Chronicle of Education, with Edsurge’s help, published in October.

In April, Pitchbook, another investment database listed the most valuable ed-tech companies. According to its calculations, those were Pluralsight (valued at $1 billion), Instructure (valued at $554 million), Lynda.com (valued at $46 million), Coursera (valued at $367 million), Open English (valued at $350 million), Sympoz (valued at $339 million), D2L (valued at $330 million), Lumos Labs (valued at $265 million), Clever (valued at $247 million), and Edmodo (valued at $236 million). Following its investment this year, Udacity would certainly now be near the top of that list, as it became a “unicorn,” that is a company valued at $1 billion.

So what’s popular among investors? Test prep. Tutoring. Private student loans. Learning management systems. Online “skills training.”

The most active investors in ed-tech this year include Learn Capital, Kapor Capital, New Enterprise Associates, NewSchools Venture Fund, Owl Ventures, 500 Startups, and Rethink Education. German media company Bertelsmann was involved in two of the biggest investment rounds this year: Udacity and HotChalk. The same could be said for Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Udacity and AltSchool. A special shout-out to celebrities Carmelo Anthony and Adam Levine who both invested in ed-tech startups this year.

VC Funding (Some Context)

To put things in a little perspective:

Despite its record-breaking year, ed-tech only receives a fraction of all VC funding and the “big deals” in ed-tech are dwarfed by those seen in the rest of the tech sector. Uber alone has raised almost $5 billion this year, for example.

Via The New York Times: “Nearly two-thirds of the top 71 investment funds have no women as senior investment team members, according to the data compiled by the Social and Capital Partnership and the Information, a news site. Roughly 30 percent of those funds have a senior investment team that is composed entirely of white members.”

Recommended reading: Tad Friend’s profile in The New Yorker of investor Marc Andreessen: Tomorrow’s Advance Man.

Meanwhile: “Is Silicon Valley Driving Teachers Out?” The Atlantic reported in July that, “As housing costs in America’s tech hub continue to soar, local educators are finding it tough to stay and work in the area.”

Beyond VC Funding

“US education is a $1.5 trillion industry and growing at 5 percent annually,” McKinsey wrote excitedly this summer. Of course, venture capital is just one source of the money that’s pouring into ed-tech. There’s government funding, of course. There’s personal spending. And there’s lots and lots of “philanthropy.”

The Gates Foundation is perhaps the most famous of these philanthropic organizations, having spent billions of dollars pushing various education initiatives. In October, Bill Gates gave what Education Week observed was “his first major speech on education in seven years,” and indicated his foundation would “double down” on teacher preparation and common academic standards.

The other two giants in education foundations: the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

In September, the LA Times obtained a memo written by the Broad Foundation, outlining its $490 million plan to put half of LAUSD students in charter schools. The memo “lays out a strategy for moving forward, including how to raise money, recruit and train teachers, provide outreach to parents and navigate the political battle that will probably ensue.” It cites several large foundations and California multi-millions who could be tapped for more financial support.

And this underscores one of the major criticisms of these philanthropic efforts: they are profoundly anti-democratic. As John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker earlier this month, “people like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can.”

Zuckerberg’s name is next to Gates’ in that sentence because he has signed the “Giving Pledge,” Gates’ and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet’s challenge to the 1% to give away at least half of their wealth. After the birth of his daughter this fall, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan wrote her a letter (and posted it on Facebook, of course). In covering the contents of the letter, the New York Times got the headline totally wrong: “Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares for Charity.” The paper later clarified that it’s not a charity but an LLC– a “$45 billion tax loophole,” some suggested. Headlines from Gawker: “Mark Zuckerberg Will Donate Massive Fortune to Own Blinkered Worldview.” And from Rolin Moe: “You’re Not an Asshole, Mark Zuckerberg. You’re Just Wrong..”

Among the projects that the new Zuckerberg Chan Initiative will fund: “personalized learning” (whatever the hell that means).

Zuckerberg’s interest in such a thing is no doubt connected to investments that he’s already made – in the private school AltSchool, for example. And in September, Facebook announced that it had been working on building software for the Summit charter school chain. “Facebook’s move into education may be unexpected, but it seems to be sincere,” wrote The Verge’s Casey Newton about the collaboration in an article that’s not much more than a “longform expanded version of the Facebook press release.”

Joining Gates and Zuckerberg in venture philanthropy is Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. Her organization, the Emerson Collective, announced a campaign – XQ: The Super School Project– to get folks to “rethink high school.” 5 of the “best ideas” will receive a share of the $50 million Jobs has earmarked for the project. The Emerson Collective also invested in AltSchool and Udacity this year to give you an idea of what “best ideas” might look like.

“I can conceive of no greater mistake… than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice” – William Jewett Tucker

Incubating Startups

One way to judge interest in ed-tech startups is to look at the amount of funding. Another way might be to count the number of accelerator programs. And wow, did these ever proliferate this year.

Even the the Pope jumped in on this, launching an education accelerator program called Scholas Labs in February..

Other new incubator/accelerator programs: In March, Edukwest reported that“Don Burton, former Managing Director of the Kaplan/Techstars EdTech Accelerator, and Jonathan D. Harber, co-founder and CEO of Schoolnet, [have] teamed up to launch a new edtech accelerator program in New York.” In April, SIIA’s education division announced the participants in its “Innovation Incubator Program.” One of them is some tiny little tech company called Adobe. Speaking of little tech companies, Intel launched an Education Accelerator. So did AT&T, with Edusrge’s CEO Betsy Corcoran and Udacity’s CEO Sebastian Thrun sitting on the Board of Directors. The University of Virginia Curry School of Education launched one in February. BoomStartup, run by “former Pearson pals,” according to Edsurge, launched one in April. The venture capital fund NewSchool Venture Fund launched one in July. Also launching in July two new incubators in Southeast Asia: Topica EdTechLab in Hanoi and Lithan EdTech Accelerator in Singapore.

These all join other existing accelerators, including ImagineK12, LearnLaunch, and 1776.

There’s actually little proof that these programs actually help startups, but hey.

Startups For Sale

There were plenty of predictions this year that all this investment would result in exits – that is, IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions – that would “defy historical trends.” The education sector is “hot” for these sorts of deals, one investment banker said in August.

The big one: LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion.

Brentwood Associates bought Excelligence. inRESONANCE bought SchoolYard. Hack Reactor bought MakerSquare. Pluralsight bought Code School. Fingerprint bought Cognitive Kid and Scribble Press. Google bought Launchpad Toys. Blackboard bought SchoolWires. Sibling Group bought Urban Planet Mobile. Alma bought Always Prepped. Elsevier bought Newsflo. The Advisory Board Company bought GradesFirst. Renaissance Learning bought UClass. Hobsons bought Starfish Retention Systems. Harris School Solutions bought Classmate. Embibe bought 100Marks. Rakuten bought Overdrive. Popexpert bought Online Marketing Institute. Bonnier Business Press bought Clio Online. Valore bought Boundless. Proquest bought SIPX. After College bought Collegefeed. The Learning House bought Software Craftsmanship Guild. Rizk Ventures bought Classroom 24–7. XSEED Education bought Pleolabs. Ellucian bought Helix Education’s LMS. Blackboard bought Remote Learner UK. TES Global bought Unijobs. EBSCO bought Learning Express. Oxford University Press bought bab.la. Proquest bought MyLibrary and OASIS. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought Scholastic’s ed-tech business. TAL Education Group bought Gaokaopai. Sandbox Partners bought Pearson’s Family Entertainment Network. The Learning House bought Acatar. Automattic bought WooThemes. Oxford University Press bought Epigeum. TES Global bought Hibernia College UK. West Corporation bought SharpSchool. Learnbrite bought Chatmapper. Pearson VUE bought ProctorCam. Vista Equity bought PowerSchool. Techstars bought UP Global and the Startup Weekend franchise. gphomestay bought Brooks Institute. Kuepa bought First Class. Simplilearn bought Market Motive. Level Data bought Student Sync. Safari Media bought Popforms. Data Recognition Corporation bought McGraw-Hill Education’s testing business. Apollo Education Group bought Iron Yard. Blackboard bought X-Ray Analytics. Recruit Holdings bought Quipper. TargetX bought Uversity (formerly known as Inigral). Pluralsight bought Hackhands. NetDragon bought Promethean. Atomic Learning bought Versifit Technologies. Nikkei bought The Financial Times from Pearson. Unizin bought Courseload. Civitas Learning bought BlikBook. Noodle bought AllClasses.com. Blackbaud bought Smart Tuition. Blackboard bought Nivel Siete. Affirm bought LendLayer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought MeeGenius. Education Week bought Learning Matters. TPG Capital bought Ellucian. Perceivant bought Bearface Instructional Technologies. 21st Century Fox bought National Geographic. Education Corporation of America bought some Kaplan Higher Education campuses. EnglishCentral bought Langrich. Cengage Learning bought Learning Objects. TAL Education bought FirstLeap. Gutenberg Technology bought Neodemia. Joel Klein and other Amplify executives bought Amplify from News Corp. Hack Reactor bought Mobile Makers Academy. Principled Technologies bought WeeJee Learning. Work Day bought Media Core. ProQuest bought Ex Libris. Bibliotheca bought 3M’s library division. Cengage Learning bought Pathbrite. PowerSchool bought InfoSnap. Cross Street LLC bought Double Line Partners, developers of the Ed-Fi data framework. Blackboard bought Blue Canary. Open English bought Next University. Apollo Education bought Career Partner GmbH.

A few comments on this long list of acquisitions:

• I hadn’t heard of the vast majority of these companies – either the ones being bought or the ones doing the buying.
• Pearson sold The Financial Times and its share in The Economist in order to focus “100%” on its global education strategy. It also sold PowerSchool, so it appears its global education strategy will remain textbooks and standardized testing. It’s struggled quite a bit with both this years, losing major testing contracts in Texas and New York and losing textbook contracts with several major UK universities. I’ll have more to say about Pearson’s year in the “failure” section below. Congrats, Pearson.
• I’ll also have more to say about Amplify in that “failure” section. Congrats, Amplify.
• Despite a “brain drain” at Blackboard (really, layoffs at all levels of the company), the learning management system company continues to buy startups, particularly those that offer “predictive analytics.” Blackboard is also seeking to expand its business outside the US, buying three Moodle-related startups. I’ll say more about Blackboard in the “stock market” section below too. Congrats, Blackboard.
• The library technology space saw a great deal of consolidation this year, with ProQuest making several major acquisitions.
• As I’ve written about previously, for-profit higher education companies are interested in buying coding bootcamps. The “skills training” market is really hot – for investment and acquisition.
• Private equity firms sure love buying ed-tech companies. Perhaps because the stock market’s sorta “meh” about them.

IPOs and Education Companies on the Stock Market

According to Techcrunch, 2015 was the “Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009.” Bad timing, I guess, for all those education startups who were hopeful about their IPO chances, following 2U’s successful public offering last year. It’s still much more likely that a big education company will gobble up a little education company than go public.

There was just one education IPO this year: Instructure. Okay, there were two if you count IAC’s Match Group, which does own The Princeton Review and Tutor.com (along with Tinder and Match.com, of course). Don’t ever change, ed-tech.

Two other education companies filed for an IPO in 2015 but have not yet started trading publicly: the world’s biggest for-profit education company, Laureate Education, and textbook publisher McGraw Hill Education. And CL Educate, which announced it would IPO last year, deferred those plans.

One of the interesting side benefits of companies going public is that they have to disclose their financials. One insight from Instructure’s IPO filing: “Sales and marketing spending, as a percentage of total revenues, reached 136 percent in 2012 (the S–1 does not include information prior to 2012). Even though Instructure has seen a fivefold increase in revenue since then, spending on sales and marketing has hovered at around 80 percent since 2013.”

Blackboard, once also publicly traded, was acquired by a private equity firm in 2011, so its financials are kept private. Reuters reported in July that the company was going up for sale, as its owner was seeking $3.4 billion for it. The news prompted quitea bit of speculation– but no buyer. Blackboard suffers from messaging problems according to Mindwire Consulting’s Michael Feldstein. But more damning, perhaps, it suffers from “complexity problems” according to former Bb employee George Kroner.

I included a bunch of snapshots of the stock performance from various for-profit education companies in an earlier article in this series. (Spoiler alert: pretty poor.) I’ll include a few more here from other publicly traded ed-tech companies:

Closures and Bankruptcies and Utter Failures

Although startups are notoriously short-lived – 80%–90% fail in their first year – most of the major failures this year came from big education companies, not little one. There were a handful of ed-tech startups entering the deadpool, sure. But the names of the companies that really stumbled in 2015 were big names – RadioShack, for example, which filed bankruptcy at the beginning of the year. They were companies that had raised a lot of money – The Washington Post reported in May that Thinkgate LLC had closed its doors “after receiving millions in Race to the Top funds.”

Last year, I dedicated a whole article to the failures in ed-tech. The massive disaster surrounding LAUSD’s iPad implementation (among other things) surely warranted the scrutiny.

The fallout from LAUSD continued this year, with Pearson eventually reaching a settlement with the district this fall to the tune of $6.45 million – a reimbursement for the flawed vaporware curriculum that was to come pre-installed on those iPads. (There haven’t been any public announcements about the FBI investigation or the SEC inquiry into the procurement process that gave Apple and Pearson the deal with LAUSD in the first place.)

Back in 2013, it was the entrance of News Corp’s education company Amplify into the hardware market that drew headlines – positive and negative. “News Corp’s Education Tablet May Be the Bureaucratic Fit Schools Need to Adopt Tech,” wrote Techcrunch’s Greg Ferenstein (who also authored one of those great “iPads will revolutionize education” stories way back in 2011). From the get-go, Amplify struggled with sales and with implementation and with PR. (It probably didn’t help that it was also closely identified with another massive ed-tech failure, inBloom.) Overheating chargers, along with quick-to-break devices, plagued its much ballyhooed tablet rollout in Guilford County, North Carolina, and the district put the initiative on pause. Guilford County did (finally) get its Amplify tablet initiative up and running this year. Just in time for Amplify to implode.

The signs were there for a while (although not everyone seemed to see them): “News Corp.’s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures,” Bloomberg reported in April. “Rupert Murdoch’s Education Company Will Stop Making Tablets,” Buzzfeed reported in June. “News Corp. Planning to Sell Off Money-Losing Education Unit,” The New York Times reported in August.

In September, News Corp sold Amplify to Amplify’s management team, including Joel Klein. Terms of the deal were not disclosed (but I bet it was less than the $360 million that News Corp spent to buy Wireless Generation back in 2010).

Education: yup, it’s a “tough space,” alright. Of course, it doesn’t help when ed-tech is so awful.

The Ethics of the Business of Ed-Tech

In April, The New York Times’ William Cohan asked venture capitalists about the ethical responsibility they might have for the investments they make. The query was specifically related to Yik Yak, which as I noted in a previous article in this series was surely one the most controversial technologies on schools this year.

Do venture capitalists and other highly sophisticated and compensated investors, like those controlling large private equity and hedge funds, have any moral or ethical responsibility for the investments they make?

Should the smart-money crowd be held accountable for the harm caused to people who use the products and services created with the money that springs from their coffers?

Or is the bottom line the only thing that matters when it comes to investing?

Cohan reached out to Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz who was responsible for the investment that firm made in Yik Yak. (The startup has raised $73.5 million total.) Goetz did not answer Cohan’s questions beyond the boilerplate answers about how the app facilitates connection and community.

Beyond that, Mr. Goetz directed me to Hilary McQuaide, Yik Yak’s new director of communications. As one would expect, her answers were filled with the usual corporate pablum. Was there anything else she could help me with, Ms. McQuaide wondered? Why yes, I answered: I would still like to hear from Mr. Goetz on the question of what responsibility venture capitalists bear, if any, for financing companies that encourage anonymous cyberbullying? I am still waiting.

I’d add to Cohan’s line of questioning a few more things specifically related to education: what are the responsibilities for investors when it comes to products and services that will, in all likelihood, exacerbate educational inequalities? Are there any obligations to verify if the wildclaimsmade by entrepreneurs during pitch meetings are actually true?

No doubt, these questions are something journalists need to consider too.

Too often, journalists become PR wings of the tech industry, simply repeating those wild claims that entrepreneurs have made to their investors and potential customers. “Mind-reading robo tutors in the sky!” In all fairness, as the Department of Labor reported last year, there are almost 6 PR professionals in the US to every 1 journalist, and so it can be challenging to wade through all the bullshit.

But technology journalism and education technology journalism tend to suffer not just from too much credulity when it comes to the stories they write. There’s an a priori that many of publications operate under: that technology is necessary; that technology is inevitable; that technology makes things better. These publications are advocates for technology (and by extension for the technology industry) and very rarely ask difficult questions of it.

Many of these publications are also funded by the technology industry. As I noted earlier in this article, AOL owns Techcrunch. Among those the Gates Foundation funds (or has funded): The Hechinger Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, and Edsurge. For its part, Edsurge announced earlier this month that it had raised $2.8 million in venture capital from 1776.vc and the Omidyar Network. It’s raised $5.66 million total (that’s excluding Gates Foundation money) from many of the major ed-tech investors: NewSchools Venture Fund, Learn Capital, GSV Capital, and others.

These publications insist they retain editorial control over their content. But there’s no escaping the ideological bent of their ed-tech coverage.

In June, Edsurge announced a new “concierge” service, whereby companies can pay the publication to promote them to schools’ procurement teams. Edsurge takes a cut of any contracts awarded. There are lots of questions here about ethics, I think– journalistic and otherwise. But the move shouldn’t be that much of a surprise as the ed-tech industry has long complained that schools’ procurement processes are highly flawed, and Edsurge has positioned itself as a key information broker in the market.

With all the funding and all the products flooding the space, how do teachers and students and parents learn about ed-tech? Well, other than reading industry-funded publications, they could attend industry-funded events, I suppose. (ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, still boasts one of the biggest ed-tech conferences. It named Jim Flanagan its new chief learning officer this year. Flanagan was previously the National Director of Sales at Amplify.)

EdCamp, which once positioned itself as a “grassroots” professional development event, has itself become increasingly astro-turfed. The organization behind EdCamps raised venture funding from NewSchools Venture Fund last year, and this year it received a $2 million grant from the Gates Foundation. (The news prompted Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez to pen an “open letter” to Edcamps.) Here’s director Hadley Ferguson’s advice to startups: “How to Get Your Name into the Minds and Hearts of Teachers.” (Spoiler alert: give EdCamp money or swag.)

All the Best Ed-Tech Narratives Money Can Buy

All this business. All this disruptive innovation. It’s just magnific… Wait, what? Academic research challenging Clayton Christensen’s famous business school concept outlined in The Innovator’s Dilemma and applied to education in Disrupting Class and The Innovative University and invoked by just about every ed-tech entrepreneur and investor ever? Oh yes please.

Jill Lepore had already skewered the idea in The New Yorker last year. I wrote a little something on the topic back in 2013.

But now, as The Chronicle of Education wrote in September,

a new paper, the most extensive test yet of Christensen’s theory, may prove more difficult to dismiss. Andrew A. King, a professor at the Dartmouth College business school, and Baljir Baatartogtokh, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, spent two years digging into disruption, interviewing scores of experts, trying to determine whether 77 of Christensen’s own examples conformed to his theory, studies involving big names like Ford, McDonald’s, and Google, along with lesser-known makers of blood-glucose meters and blended plastics. Only a tiny minority – 9 percent – fit Christensen’s criteria. Disruption is real but rare, King and Baatartogtokh conclude, which suggests that it’s at best a marginally useful explanation of how innovation happens.

King says he’s not out to take down Christensen, although that may be what he’s done. Instead, he wants to prove a point. “A theory is like a weed,” King says. “Unless it is pruned back by empirical testing, it will grow to fill any void.”

Much like the business of ed-tech…

Education Politics

“Clinton: ‘I Wouldn’t Keep Any School Open That Wasn’t Doing A Better Than Average Job.’” No schools in Lake Wobegon will be required to close.

“Creationist Sylvia Allen to lead Arizona Senate education panel.” What could go wrong?

Via the Hechinger Report: “As he leaves the U.S. Department of Education, the leader of its Office of Ed Tech appeals for greater equity.”

“Hundreds of thousands of college students who were deceived about the terms of their debit cards by Higher One Holdings will receive a total of $55 million in restitution, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve” announced this week.

“What If Social Media Becomes 16-Plus?” asks danah boyd, scrutinizing a proposed law in the EU that would allow countries to restrict children’s access to the Internet.

Education in the Courts

“The FTC has settled COPPA violation cases with two small app developers with civil penalties totaling $360,000,” according to Gamasutra.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the University of New Hampshire’s 2013 firing of Marco Dorfsman, an associate professor of Spanish, after he admitted to altering a colleague’s student evaluations.”

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Mattel, ToyTalk, and kidSAFE, alleging that Hello Barbie (the new surveillance Barbie) violates COPPA.

Testing, Testing…

“ESSA’s Flexibility on Assessment Elicits Qualms From Testing Experts,” says Education Week.

Statewide participation in the new PARCC exams was 97%, according to California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

“Less than 1 percent of the learners in the massive open online course partnership between Arizona State University and edX are eligible to earn credit for their work, according to enrollment numbers from the inaugural courses,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “Dean Dad” Matt Reed weighs in. Meanwhile: “Starbucks Partnership With ASU Benefits Education Giant Pearson.”

“In a Fake Online Class With Students Paid to Cheat, Could Professors Catch the Culprits?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Coursera has released the list of its most popular courses in 2015. Topping the list: “Learning How to Learn.”

Class Central has released its report on 2015 MOOC enrollment: “The MOOC space essentially doubled this year. More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years of the modern MOOC space’s existence.”

Meanwhile on Campus

NYU continues to be awful. Two stories side-by-side: “N.Y.U. President’s Penthouse Gets a Face-Lift Worth $1.1 Million (or More),” The New York Times reports. “NYU Apologizes For Telling Low-Income Student They Probably Can't Afford Grad School,” Buzzfeed writes.

“This year, students at the University of Cape Town successfully pushed for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist tycoon seen by many as an architect of apartheid. Oxford University, in the country of his birth, might be next,” The New York Times reports. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has an opinion, and the BBC is on it. According to Inside Higher Ed, Oxford’s Oriel College has started the process of taking down a plague honoring Rhodes.

Students at Oberlin are protesting the food on campus.

Via Buzzfeed: “The Indian government has advised citizens enrolled in two small California colleges to temporarily defer travel to the U.S., after the country's state-owned airline said it has been warned by U.S. officials that the schools are under investigation.”

In Pocatello, Idaho, “Lunch lady fired for giving free lunch to hungry student.”

Via Boing Boing: “In Texas, a 12 year old Sikh boy was arrested for ‘terrorism’ over a solar charger.”

The New York Times profiles Y Roads: “Program Offers Classes and Support for Young Adults Who Didn’t Finish High School”

The Pacific Standard reports that “Millions of Students Attend Schools in ‘Potential Impact Zones’ for Oil Train Disasters.”

“Most New York City Elementary Schools Are Violating Disabilities Act,” according to The New York Times.

Go, School Sports Team!

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The National Collegiate Athletic Association ruled Tuesday that the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s men’s basketball staff violated several NCAA rules in recent years, including falsifying admissions forms for an international student who did not meet the financial requirements to obtain a visa.”

From the HR Department

“Why James Billington’s Retirement is a Wake-Up Call for Librarians” by Peter Brantley.

The National Labor Relations Board will consider whether grad students at Columbia University are entitled to unionize.

Adjuncts at Brandeis University have voted to unionize.

Via The New York Times: “A New Jersey school district on Tuesday rejected accusations by a Muslim teacher that she was fired because of her religion as ‘brazenly false’ and ‘frivolous.’ In a statement, the Hunterdon County district said Sireen Hashem was not fired from Hunterdon Central Regional High School, but simply did not have her contract renewed, for reasons ‘that were fully and clearly explained to her and her representation.’”

“Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, and Larycia Hawkins, a tenured faculty member in political science, are apparently at an impasse over her continued employment at the college,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Upgrades and Downgrades

“The HTTP 451 Error Code for Censorship Is Now an Internet Standard.”

“Telecommunications regulators in India have ordered the suspension of Facebook’s controversial program to bring free basic Internet services to mobile phone users in the country,” The New York Times reports.

Michael Feldstein looks at McGraw-Hill’s new “personalized learning authoring product.”

Yet another ed-tech accelerator: this one a partnership between Runway and the Michelson 20MM Foundation.

“National Education Week Wants to Be Edtech’s Art Basel,” Edsurge reports. (And I confess: I had to Google “Art Basel.”)

“Blackboard Continues Revitilization with New Office Space,” says Tech.co. Because nothing says innovation like an open office plan. (Bonus points for the misspelled headline too.)

Funding and Acquisitions

Technology Will Save Us (yes, that’s the real name of a company) has raised $1.8 million from Backed and a “substantial retail investor.” The company makes the BBC micro:bit.

Test prep company Gojimo has raised $1.8 million from Robin and Saul Klein, Deborah Quazzo, the London Co-Investment Fund, Firestar; Index Ventures, and Jamjar Investments. The company has raised $4 million total.

“Bloomsbury Publishing is set to acquire LexisNexis and Jordan family law publishing assets from RELX, subject to approval, for £1.4m.,” The Bookseller reports.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

According to Fusion, “Hackers breaking into baby cams are actually trying to help.”

Data and “Research”

According to the latest report from Pew Research Center, home broadband has seen a “modest decline” from 2013 to 2015.

Edsurge has published its look at the record-setting year in US ed-tech investment.

“Do In-Class Exams Make Students Study Harder?” The Atlantic asks.

Via Education Week: “Music Instruction Lacks Diversity, Study Finds.”

Also via Education Week: “Toddlers Gain Touch-Screen Skills Early, Study Finds.”

“Student Loan Subsidies Cause Almost All of the Increase in Tuition,” according to the Foundation for Economic Education.

“The (Short) Lives of Poor, Urban Teenagers” by Lisa Wade in The Pacific Standard.

Via Politico: "Four in 10 American children live in low-income families, according to a recent report from the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy.

The Trends

• The Politics of Education Technology
• Standardized Testing
• “The Employability Narrative”
• Credits and Credentialing
• The Collapse of For-Profit Higher Education (Or Not)
• Beyond the MOOC
• The Compulsion for Data
• Social Media, Campus Activism, and Free Speech
• Indie Ed-Tech
• The Business of Ed-Tech

The GitHub Repo

If you’re interested in the data that drives this year’s trends, explore the Github repo. You can also read some of the updates on this project I’ve penned throughout the year.

The Credits

The work I do on this series would not be possible without the writing and research undertaken by many people in education technology. A list of – and a deep thank you for – those whose work can be found in the links and in my thinking throughout this project and throughout the year (apologies if I've forgotten anyone):

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Justin Reich, Neil Selwyn, Mike Caulfield, Matt Reed, Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, Jessie Stommel, Sean Michael Morris, Sherman Dorn, Kin Lane, Tim Maughan, Evgeny Morozov, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, Rolin Moe, Chris Lehmann, Jose Vilson, Melinda Anderson, Melonie Fullick, Kate Bowles, David Kernohan, Michael Feldstein, Phil Hill, Martin Weller, Alan Levine, Jessica Luther, Bill Fitzgerald, Libby Nelson, Molly Hensley-Clancy, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Benjamin Herold, Carl Straumsheim, Dan Meyer, Tony Wan, Natasha Singer, Morgan Polikoff, Bryan Alexander, and of course Seymour Papert.

Education Politics

Happy New Year. From US News & World Report: “For technology companies in California, ringing in the New Year will mean adjusting to a new privacy law that limits how they can collect and use student data. The data privacy legislation was originally signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014 and goes into effect Jan. 1. It prohibits the operators of education websites, online services and apps from using any student’s personal information for targeted advertising or creating a commercial profile, as well as the selling of any student’s information.”

Via The New York Times: “How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education.”

“FCC Reaches $3 Million Settlement with New York City Department of Education in E-Rate Investigation.” “The consent decree is significant in several respects,” Comm Law Monitor reports. “First, this marks the first significant action handled by the USF ‘Strike Force’ established by Chairman Wheeler in 2014. It also marks the largest e-rate settlement to date, and includes many compliance plan requirements that could become de facto standards for future E-rate enforcement actions. Further, to the best we can determine, this is the first E-rate enforcement action the Commission has taken against a school or library applicant under the program.”

Via The New York Times: “Israel’s Ministry of Education has decided not to include a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man on the list of required reading for Hebrew high school literature classes, prompting a stormy debate over how Israeli society deals with its cultural divides.”

Education in the Courts

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Pennsylvania authorities have filed criminal charges of felony indecent assault against Bill Cosby in regard to an incident involving a former employee of Temple University. While many women have publicly accused the comedian of raping them, most of the allegations involve interactions for which statutes of limitations have expired.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

The New York Times still loves MOOCs: “The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn.”

Meanwhile on Campus

“City College of S.F. splurges on administrators’ travel, meals,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Via The New York Times: “Schools Evaluate Threats, Questioning When to Shut Down.”

Via The New York Times: “As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short.”

Via The Atlantic: “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids.”

“Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future.”

Go, School Sports Team!

“Mississippi Valley State Is Playing 14 Straight Road Games Because It Can’t Afford Not To.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time [college football] teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.”

Via The Washington Post: “Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. Here’s the evidence.”

From the HR Department

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014–15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013–14.”

Curtis B. Charles, president of Tiffin University, has quit after only six months on the job.

Upgrades and Downgrades

This story is about health startups, not ed-tech ones. But the headline on this story from The Verge is still pretty applicable to ed-tech: “ Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation.”

The pushback against Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org continues – last week in India; this week in Egypt. Via The New York Times: “A program that provided more than three million Egyptians with free access to Internet services was abruptly shut down on Wednesday, according to Facebook, the social media company that provided the program in cooperation with an Egyptian cellphone company.”

Markdown has been added to Wikity (and Mike Caulfield explains why this is important).

From the press release: “Instructure Releases Beta Version of Arc, a Complete Video Platform Solution.”

LibraryBox v2.1.

Via Phil Hill: “Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?”

Funding and Acquisitions

Terra Dotta has raised $6 million from undisclosed investors.

Careers360 has acquired Entrancecorner.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aspiring Minds has acquired LetsIntern.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn,” The Washington Post reports.

Data and “Research”

Via the Hechinger Report: “Black students are drastically underrepresented at top public colleges, data show.”

Education Politics

Arne’s officially out, and John King is now Acting Secretary of Education. (And the for-profit college sector has already reached out to him, no surprise.)

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior College, the accreditor for California’s community colleges, lost its appeal to the Department of Education and will have a year to resolve issues around its not meeting federal accreditation standards.

The FTC has fined Lumosity $2 million over deceptive advertising claims about its “brain training” program.

Education in the Courts

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The loan guarantor USA Funds plans to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court … seeking to overturn a federal appeals court ruling that barred the agency from collecting fees from a borrower who had defaulted on her student loan but started repaying it.”

The Authors Guild’s appeal of the “Google Books lawsuit” has reached the Supreme Court (although there’s no guarantee that the court will hear the case).

Also looking to have his case picked up by the Supreme Court: Taylor Bell, a high school student who claims his first amendment rights were violated when he was suspended for writing a rap song about his school’s coaches.

Also before the Supreme Court: Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which will determine the legality of mandatory union fees.

Testing, Testing…

Delaware is dropping the Smarter Balanced test in exchange for the SAT for eleventh graders.

West Virginia is considering dropping SBAC in exchange for the ACT.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs (a.k.a. Online Education)

“Towards Automated Study Guides for MOOCs: A Tech Report From the Stanford Info Lab.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Six universities from Australia, Europe, Canada and the U.S. are seeking to establish a new alliance in which each organization’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) are formally accredited by partner institutions.”

“Penn State World Campus is partnering with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) to offer union members the opportunity to finish their degrees online,” Campus Technology reports.

“Could Silicon Valley virtual charter’s all-inclusive model revolutionize the space?” asks Education Dive. Nope. It can’t.

Meanwhile on Campus

“What’s So Innovative About Salman Khan’s One-Room Schoolhouse?” asks Edsurge. NPR also profiled Khan Academy’s new “lab school.” Solid work on the PR front, Khan Academy.

“Older Students Learn for the Sake of Learning,” and The New York Times is on it.

Barber-Scotia College, a HBCU, will close for the spring semester.

@edsbs holy shit I never thought it was THIS bad pic.twitter.com/HKIIgyvMa1

— Josh (@JoshuaBBlack) January 5, 2016

Via The New York Times: “The scope of a sexual abuse scandal at St. George's School in Rhode Island widened substantially on Tuesday as lawyers reported that at least 40 former students had made credible reports of sexual abuse, and in some cases rape, by seven former staff members and four students over three decades.”

“Federal Campus Rape Investigations Near 200, And Finally Get More Funding,” the Huffington Post reports.

Colleges are banning hoverboards on campus.

Go, School Sports Team!

“ESPN’s College Football Playoff Ratings Plummet On New Year’s Eve,” NPR reports.

From the HR Department

Blackboard has replaced its CEO Jay Bhatt. The new head of the LMS company: Bill Ballhaus.

Wheaton College announced that it is taking steps to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins because of statements she made about Christians and Muslims worshiping the same god.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “More than 100 Republican state legislators have urged the University of Missouri at Columbia to fire Melissa Click, a communications professor who was videotaped during a campus protest blocking a student journalist from getting close to the protest.”

Via Edsurge: “Jim Shelton Appointed 2U President After Rob Cohen Announces Retirement.”

“A Florida Atlantic University professor who suggested in blog postings and radio interviews that the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary and other mass shootings were a hoax designed by the Obama administration to boost support for gun control was fired Tuesday,” The New York Times reports.

Via The NYT: “The principal at a Success Academy charter school who created a ‘Got to Go’ list of difficult students is taking a personal leave of absence, a Success Academy spokeswoman said on Monday.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

LEGO Education has launched a new version of its WeDo robotics kit.

Four new elements have been synthesized, completing the seventh row of the periodic table and making all non-OER chemistry textbooks out-of-date. (There’s a petition to name one of the heavy metal elements after Lemmy.)

Fortune has a special report on business interests behind the Common Core State Standards.

Forbes has published its annual clickbait “30 Under 30.” I’m unwilling to turn off my ad-blocker to read that crappy site, so if you’re like me, you’ll have to get the information about its “education changemakers” secondhand from Edsurge.

Elsewhere in clickbait, Inc has published its list of the 5000 fastest growing companies (note: just like Forbes’ clickbait, you have to apply to appear on the list), and whee, there are some education ones on it.

Khan Academy is seeking a patent on A/B testing educational videos.

Campus Technology has a list of “10 Products From CES That Will Impact the Classroom,” including a “smart helmet.” So yeah. No.

Via The New York Times: “Putting the Heat on Yik Yak After a Killing on Campus.”

“E-learning for Africa held back by power shortage,” the BBC reports.

“In 2016, The Coding Bootcamp Bubble Is Bound to Burst,” Wired predicts.

“Google is becoming U.S. K–12 schools’ operating system,” the San Jose Mercury News contends. “Google, a ‘school official?’ This regulatory quirk can leave parents in the dark,” The Washington Post frets.

Funding and Acquisitions

Tutoring company Jerry Education has raised $40 million from Sailing Capital and the investment wing of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Degreed has raised $21 million from Jump Capital, Signal Peak, Rethink Education, and Deborah Quazzo. The startup has raised $29.8 million total.

Tutoring company Zhiyou Education has raised $9.2 million from Legend Capital.

Coding bootcamp Bloc has acquired DevBridge. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Capita has acquired Brightwave Group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Washington Post has a list of donors to the Foundation for Education Excellence, the education organization founded and formerly run by Jeb Bush.

Via Buzzfeed: “Walmart Heirs Will Give $1 Billion To Expand Charter Schools.”

Data and Surveillance

The EFF offers its review of student-related privacy issues in 2015.

Via The New York Times: “Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office.”

The latest report from the Pew Research Center looks at “Parents, Teens and Digital Monitoring.”

Bill Fitzgerald looks at school directory information and how much can be gleaned from this data, despite the privacy protections that FERPA purports to provide.

Data and “Research”

Rick Hess has published his annual list purportedly ranking “edu scholars” by their influence.

A forthcoming paper: “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.”

Ambient Insights has published a white paper about 2015 ed-tech investments, which it says totaled $6.54 billion.

Inside Higher Ed covers the results of a survey by Public Agenda about what college faculty and administrators think about competency-based education.

Via Education Week: “Nation Earns a C on Quality Counts Report Card.” (It also provides a letter grade for each individual state.)

Bryan Alexander looks at a recent report by Goldman Sachs on the state of higher ed.

“Turns Out Monkey Bars And Kickball Might Be Good For The Brain,” says NPR.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Study finds that attractive female students earn higher grades than unattractive female students do. For male students, looks don’t seem to matter.”

“The concept of different ‘learning styles’ is one of the greatest neuroscience myths,” says Quartz.

If you’ve worked in education technology for any length of time, you know the story: in January 2006, Blackboard was awarded the patent (number 6988138) on the learning management system – or as described in the patent title “Internet-based education support system and methods.”

In July of that year, Blackboard publicly announced that it had received the patent, and on the same day filed suit against its competitor Desire2Learn for patent infringement.

Blackboard’s claims of invention were dubious at best, and the lawsuit prompted an angry backlash from many in the education technology community. It’s a backlash from which I don’t think Blackboard has ever fully recovered. Sure, you might argue that Blackboard is widely reviled because its software is cumbersome, unwieldy; but the patent claim and subsequent lawsuits also demonstrated that Blackboard was a bad actor in the ed-tech community, stifling innovation by making both companies and colleges fearful that experimentations in and around the LMS would prompt litigation.

In order to demonstrate that there was in fact a long history of online course software – “prior art” that could perhaps invalidate Blackboard’s patent – a group of academics, administrators, and instructional technology types, spurred on by Michael Feldstein, took to Wikipedia, “crowdsourcing” information about the learning management system. Their entry chronicles the “History of virtual learning environments” and demonstrates that the invention claimed by Blackboard had existed long before its patent filing.

In 2008, a federal jury awarded Blackboard $3.1 million in its patent infringement lawsuit against Desire2Learn. But a year later, that was reversed on appeal after Blackboard’s patent claims were invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark Office. In 2010, Blackboard announced it would end its appeals and terminate its claim on patent number 6988138.

Patent Pledges

On its website today, Blackboard now offers “The Blackboard Patent Pledge,” promising to not file infringement claims based on the five patents it lists there: “Internet Based Support System and Methods” (numbers 7493396 and 7558853), “Internet Based Education Support System and Method with Multi-Language Capability” (number 9053500), “Internet Based Education Support System, Method and Medium Providing Security Attributes in Modular, Extensible Components” (number 7908602), and “Content System and Associated Methods” (number 8745222).

Many technology companies have started to make similar pledges, agreeing not to use their patents in offensive litigation or go after open source developers. Twitter, for example, unveiled its “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” in 2012, right in the middle of the massive legal battle between Oracle and Google over IP related to the Java programming language. It was good PR for Twitter and other signees, as there’d been a growing chorus from many in the tech industry that the patent system was broken, that litigation was costly – particularly for startups – with much derision in particular aimed at “patent trolls,” those companies which buy up patents expressly to file infringement lawsuits.

To be clear, patent pledges like Twitter’s don’t challenge the underlying principles of intellectual property or the purported benefits of patent claims. (Indeed, venture capitalists often demand that companies in their investment portfolio file for patents. There’s “value” in that IP even if the startup fails to ever become profitable itself. Patents are viewed as assets.) Rather, these types of pledges are meant to demonstrate good faith in not wielding patents in lawsuits – unless, of course, as the Innovator’s Patent Agreement says, someone has filed a patent lawsuit within the past ten years.

Anyone who’s “signed” the Innovator’s Patent Agreement would be free to sue Blackboard, for example.

Prior Art

Khan Academy is one of the ed-tech companies that has agreed to the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. It currently holds several patents: “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming” (number 20150044642) and “Systems and methods for social programming” (number 20150082274), and most recently filing for one for “Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos” (number 20150310753).

A patent, to summarize US intellectual property law, can be granted to anyone who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.” A patent gives the patent-holder the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention. The invention must be new, useful, and “non-obvious.” The requirements surrounding novelty mean that a patent cannot be obtained if the invention was “patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.”

Obtaining a patent is an expensive and lengthy undertaking. Legal fees can range from $10,000 to $30,000, and it can take as many as three years from application to approval. The slow pace might be deceiving; it’s not so much that the review is thorough, it’s that there are thousands of patent claims to wade through. The US Patent and Trademark Office received over 575,000 patent applications in 2014; it approved over 325,000. The office employs 8600 patent examiners (half of whom work from home).

Those patent examiners have access to a wealth of databases – scientific, commercial, academic – in order to research patent claims. But how exhaustive is their research? As the Wikipedia entry on the “history of the virtual learning environment” highlighted, not very. There’s a cursory check for previous and similar patents; sometimes there’s a query of a commercial database or a look at non-patent literature. (For what it’s worth, the public can see what searches examiners made in reviewing a patent claim via the USPTO website.)

Indeed, the patent approval process underscores and even furthers the historical amnesia of technology (and of ed-tech). This is not an insignificant cultural force. There’s an obsession with “innovation”; there’s an assertion that new technologies are, almost by definition, inventive breakthroughs – they must be to be patented, right? There’s little incentive in turn to situate oneself in a long line of intellectual work; instead, the incentive becomes to insist – in the legal paperwork at e very least – that one is “the first.”

Khan Academy’s patents are a strange example of this. Take the “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming.” The claim includes:

A computer-implemented method for providing computer programming instructions, comprising: (a) providing, on an electronic device of a user, a tutorial comprising (i) software having one or more lines of machine-readable code, (ii) an output associated with said machine-readable code, and (iii) instructional material associated with at least a subset of said one or more lines of machine-readable code; (b) receiving one or more edits to said one or more lines of machine-readable code from said user on said electronic device; and (c) updating said one or more lines of machine-readable code and said output based on said one or more edits.

There are, of course, many other, older examples of “methods and systems for learning computer programming”: languages like Logo and Scratch as well as a plethora of online tutorials.

When Khan Academy launched its CS curriculum in 2012, one of its developers John Resig – the inventor listed on its patent claim – said he’d been inspired to utilize a dual interface by a public talk given by Bret Victor in which Victor demoed an interactive coding environment, responsive in real-time.

One might ask, did that demo constitute prior art? In this case, based on the USPTO records, I can’t see that the examiner on this patent made any searches for prior art.

Image credits: Khan Academy's patent on teaching computer programming

An Absence of a Theory of Learning

For his part, Victor responded quite critically to Khan Academy’s CS curriculum announcement, recognizing the nod that Resig had given him but looking to clarify how radically different his ideas in “Inventing on Principle” are from what the organization released in its computer programming environment. “The features are not the point,” Victor wrote.

We often think of a programming environment or language in terms of its features – this one “has code folding”, that one “has type inference”. This is like thinking about a book in terms of its words – this book has a “fortuitous”, that one has a “munificent”. What matters is not individual words, but how the words together convey a message.

Likewise, a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose.

By focusing on the features of the live-coding that Victor had demoed, Khan Academy missed the point of the talk altogether. As such, Victor in his response questioned the design principles (or lack thereof) – and by extension the learning principles (or lack thereof) – of the Khan Academy programming environment, exhorting people to read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, “the canonical work on designing programming systems for learning, and perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general.” (Amen.)

One might conclude here that Khan Academy has received a patent on “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming” without recognizing the history of computer programming but even more damningly, without having much understanding of how learning works.

But like many technologists who’ve recently moved into education, Salman Khan has argued that theories of learning will no longer matter as much moving forward, thanks to the newfound power of data. In a 2012 interview with Psychology Today, Khan said,

“You have all this education theory and people try to make larger statements than maybe what their data would back up because they’ve done these small experiments that are tied to a very particular case with a very particular implementation... theory definitely matters, but I think dogma matters less. We can say, well ‘The current established theories say we should be conscientious of this but let’s just test it again.’ Maybe the results were only particular to that time. Now we can run very similar studies with much less pain and perhaps the theory won’t apply. That’s what’s exciting. Things like Khan Academy can be very powerful in this context. Theory tries to be very broad, it tries to make these laws of learning. But they’re almost always too general. And if you made it too particular it’s almost useless... Now the results will be particular to the Khan Academy implementation, but they will be impacting millions of students.”

In all fairness, Khan is hardly the only person to envision this “post-theory” version of education technology; the possibility of such a thing is something that has been widelydebatedin recent years within ed-tech and learning analytics circles. If, as some like Google’s Peter Norvig argue, there is an “unreasonable effectiveness of data” – particularly at scale – then theory will become unnecessary. The answers will surface themselves.

But without a model for thinking about teaching and learning, I’m not sure that the answers will– or that what’s surfaced will be meaningful, durable, accurate, or just.

Another Khan Academy patent – this one a filing, not yet a published claim – involves “Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos.” That is, it’s a patent for using A/B testing to determine the “effectiveness” of an educational video. Khan Academy’s patent application gives a nod to Google’s patent on “running multiple web page experiments”; indeed, A/B testing is far more prevalent in market research than in instructional design or education research.

Khan Academy has boasted in the past that it’s used A/B testing, along with messages promoting what Carol Dweck calls “growth mindset” to get students to complete more problems on its site and to return more frequently. (One might say then that Khan Academy does have a theory of learning; but I’d suggest that it’s behaviorism.)

Other ed-tech startups have also claimed to utilize A/B testing to get students to click more, something that’s always positioned as a huge breakthrough. From a 2013 article on MOOCs in the MIT Technology Review:

Through A/B testing, says [Andrew] Ng, Coursera recently found that its practice of e-mailing people to remind them of upcoming course deadlines actually made students less likely to continue with the courses. But sending e-mails summarizing students’ recent activity on the site boosted engagement by “several percentage points.” One A/B test by Udacity pitted a colorized version of a lesson against a black-and-white version. “Test results were much better for the black-and-white version,” says [Sebastian] Thrun. “That surprised me.”

It’s unclear whether the laundry lists of refinements that result from A/B testing will add up to a grand theory of learning and teaching that challenges tradition. Ng says he doesn’t think a grand theory is needed for MOOCs to succeed. “I read Piaget and Montessori, and they both seem compelling, but educators generally have no way to choose what really works,” he says. “Today, education is an anecdotal science, but I think we can turn education into a data-driven science, where you do what you know works.”

Again, one might be able to glean from A/B testing “what works,” but it’s not necessarily clear at all why something works (or doesn’t) without a theory or model of learning. Perhaps students accustomed to seeing full-color lessons in Udacity were simply surprised to see a lesson in black-and-white therefore paid more attention. (And perhaps if Udacity switched to all black-and-white lessons, the same results would be found once again when full-color slides were introduced.) A/B testing does not explain why students have specific misconceptions. Furthermore, many of these examples of using A/B testing – from Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity – mistake “engagement” for learning. A/B testing that’s focused on the former might do nothing for the latter; or worse, as MIT’s Justin Reich argued in a paper in Science, these efforts might “accelerate participation in ineffective practices.”

Regardless, all these practices – these “systems and methods” – are now going to be patented if the pressures and culture of the tech sector hold sway. By patenting these practices, these companies make a claim to history and to innovation: they’re “first!” They can stop others from developing what might be perceived as similar ideas. By relying on the patent process to validate their claims to innovation, these companies in turn serve to obscure the work of others who’ve long experimented in and around these very practices, particularly when those experiments are not yet technologized or when practitioners haven’t pursued the patent process.

Even more importantly, these patents now help to reinforce this idea of a “theory-free,” technological future of education. Or rather, patents become the theory. This version of the future does not guarantee that these companies have developed technologies that will help students learn. But it might mean that there will be proprietary assets to litigate over, to negotiate with, and to sell.

(Of course, as Blackboard recently demonstrated as it’s failing to find a new buyer for the company, even that’s no guarantee.)

Education Politics

President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address Tuesday evening. “Education” showed up several times in the speech, including the idea that every students need to learn to “write computer code.”

The Department of Education’s Inspector General is auditing Western Governors University over the role faculty have in its competency-based programs, Inside Higher Ed reports. “Previous audits from the inspector general have questioned whether some competency-based programs should be classified as correspondence courses.” (Jonathan Rees has more on this story.)

Via Raw Story: “Virginia GOP bill would require schools to verify children's genitals before using restroom.”

Via The Hill: “House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) is warning that a hack on the Department of Education would dwarf last year’s massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management. ‘Almost half of America's records are sitting at the Department of Education,’ Chaffetz said at a Brookings Institution event on Thursday. ‘I think ultimately that’s going to be the largest data breach that we've ever seen in the history of our nation.’”

The Republican presidential candidates had another debate this week, and Common Core was a topic (briefly).

“Bernie Sanders thinks police should investigate campus rape. That’s not enough,” says Vox’s Libby Nelson. Sanders is trying to woo teen voters, according to Wired.

Ben Carson, visiting a school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, asked students to point out the “worst” one in their class. And they did.

California Governor Jerry Brown says“it’s time to abandon API to judge schools’ performance.” That’s the Academic Performance Index (and my partner Kin Lane will be relieved that this won’t come up in future searches for Application Programming Interface).

Via Education Dive: “Rohit Chopra, a vocal critic as the student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has joined the U.S. Department of Education as a senior level official.”

Via the LA School Report: “The LA Unified board … put itself on record as opposing a proposal that originated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand the number of charter schools in the district in the years ahead.”

The EFF has sent a letter to the Department of Education asking it “to protect university students’ right to speak anonymously online, warning that curtailing anonymous speech as part of anti-harassment regulations would not only violate the Constitution but also jeopardize important on-campus activism.”

Via the NSBA’s Legal Clips blog: “Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) questioning whether ED has exceeded its legal authority in its efforts to push colleges to do more on sexual assault.”

The application for a trademark on “Makerspace” has been rejected by the German Patent and Trademark Office.

Education in the Courts

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association this week. The case challenges public unions’ ability to collect fees from non-members. Court observers seem certain that the ruling will not be in the union’s favor.

Via the Education Law Center: “Judge James Wilson of the First Judicial District Court of Nevada (Carson City) has ruled in Lopez v. Schwartz that the state’s school voucher law (SB 302) enacted last summer by the Legislature violates two provisions of the Nevada Constitution. Judge Wilson issued a preliminary injunction to prevent the State from implementing the law.”

Testing, Testing…

The latest person to make stuff up about adaptive learning is Virginia’s governor who says“the amount of time students spend taking tests could be cut through computer adaptive tests, although he didn’t provide details.”

Via The Washington Post: “Scores for new PSAT are finally out. What to know about them (and what they mean for redesigned SAT).”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs (a.k.a. Online Education)

Udacity unveiled the “Nanodegree Plus,” a $299/month nanodegree that comes with a money-back guarantee. (Read the fine print.)

“The Economist Group launched Learning.ly, a catalog of proprietary online courses, on January 12,” Edsurge reports.

Via Coursera’s technical blog: “Scaling Content Production.”

Meanwhile on Campus

Via Buzzfeed: “Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at Caltech, engaged in ‘discriminatory and harassing’ behavior toward two female graduate students, a university investigation has found.” Caltech has suspended Ott.

Could CUNY community colleges be free? Could Harvard? (It could certainly afford it.)

“University of Oregon cancels high-profile branding/advertising contract,” The Register Guard reports. It will spend the savings on academics instead. Because, ya know, it’s a school.

20 private colleges in Texas have said they will opt out of the state’s new campus carry law.

The Chronicle of Higher Education FOIA’d the emails of Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who participated in a protest on campus and was videotaped asking for “muscle” to remove a reporter from the area. (!!!)

Trinity Lutheran College will close, Inside Higher Ed reports.

The City College of San Francisco’s problems continue.

“Bronx Science Bans Cellphones From Wi-Fi as Students Devour It,” says The New York Times.

“Do Metal Detectors in Schools Do More Harm Than Good?” The Atlantic asks.

Tech and business training company General Assembly is expanding to Denver.

“The University of Akron’s LeBron James Family Foundation College of Education building may not open on time due to a contractor dispute,” Cleveland.com reports.

Education Week looks at analytics at AltSchool.

Go, School Sports Team!

Alabama won its fourth national championship in the last seven years by beating Clemson 45–40. (For those keeping score at home, Coach Nick Saban made $7,087,000 in 2015. He’ll get a nice bonus, I’m sure, for winning this game.)

Nike reaches a $252 million sponsorship deal with Ohio State. To echo a question I asked above, hell, why isn’t Ohio State free?

Via the International Business Times: “College Football: Public Universities Spend Millions On Stadiums, Despite Slim Chance For Payoff.”

“University of Maryland claims sponsor’s chocolate milk helps concussion recovery” for high school football students.

“More than a quarter of all Division I colleges, 43 percent of all universities that play in the high-profile Football Bowl Subdivision and more than half the members of the Power Five conferences committed major violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules in the last decade,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

“Disqualified after concussions, college football players recruited back onto the field,” STAT reports.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “National Collegiate Athletic Association releases new guidelines on dealing with the mental health of college athletes, an issue that remains a top concern for the association’s chief medical officer.”

The NCAA’s Division I council also“voted to give male basketball players more flexibility to test their professional sports options and return to college.”

The “NCAA punishes U of Louisiana-Lafayette over egregious case of test fraud – and the university in turn sues ACT over its role,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

From the HR Department

LAUSD hires Michelle King as its new superintendent, the first time an African American woman has held that position.

Detroit teachers have been staging a “sick out” to protest pay, class size, and the conditions of school buildings. As a result many schools have had to close this week.

“Maker Media Lays Off 17 Employees,” Edsurge reports.

The New York Times reports that “Joel Klein, Ex-New York Schools Chancellor, to Join Health Insurance Start-Up.” So I guess he’s done with the Amplify thing now?

Via The Root: “A New York City high school teacher is suing the city’s Department of Education and several school administrators after, she claims, she was fired over her lessons on the wrongly imprisoned Central Park Five for fear that it would ‘rile up’ black students.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The recent college graduate working in Starbucks is the nightmare of many parents and also of college admissions officers, who feel that stories about that stereotype discourage many prospective students. Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday released a summary of their recent research that finds the stereotype to be false and the economic difficulties of recent college graduates to be overstated.”

According to Business Ethics Highlights, “adjunct justice” would cost universities $15–50 billion per year.

Upgrades and Downgrades

The new HBO-first Sesame Street looks awful.

Edsurge profiles the latest batch of startups participating in the ImagineK12 ed-tech accelerator.

Haiku Learning is sunsetting ActiveGrade (which it acquired two years ago).

Via Politico: “Conservative activist James O’Keefe, known for secretly recording his targets, is going after the Common Core in his latest video. It shows a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt saleswoman saying, ‘I hate kids’ and that ‘it’s all about the money.’ O’Keefe calls Common Core a scheme to make schools buy more textbooks. The publishing giant said it was ‘appalled’ by the woman’s comments, and she told the Washington Post that she had been fired.”

According to the USA Today, “Apple loses more ground to Google’s Chromebook in education market.”

Apple released a preview of features that will appear in iOS9.3 and that will help schools manage devices more easily. More via Edsurge.

“Lego changes stance on bulk orders after Ai Weiwei exhibition controversy.”

“These Are the American Library Association’s Picks for Best Children’s Literature.”

“5 outrageous things educators can’t do because of copyright.”

Funding, Sales, and Acquisitions

The Apollo Education Group announced that it was exploring selling off the University of Phoenix, the biggest for-profit university in the US. More via Phil Hill.

“The Massive Decline In Larger Education Company Market Caps,” by Phil Hill.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is getting into the education philanthropy business.

Interfolio has raised $13.01 million from Quad Venture Partners, Blu Venture Investors, Blackboard’s founder Matthew Pittinsky, NextGen Angels, and Middleland Capital. The company has raised $13.94 million total.

CourseHorse has raised $4 million from Red Ventures. The local classes marketplace has raised $5.8 million total.

Noodle Markets has raised $3 million from Rethink Education and Palm Ventures.

“Branded MOOC platform” The Big Know has raised $3 million from LFE Capital and Capella Education Founder Steve Shank.

Platzi has raised $2.1 million in seed funding from Omidyar Network, 500 Startups, Nazca Ventures, Amasia Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Just Dakhila has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Ankur Gupta.

ExpertKnowledge has raised $725,000 in seed funding from The Edge Edtech Fund and Action Ventures.

Edsurge chronicles “Teachscape’s Tangled Tale” and its decision to sell its customer list and assets to Frontline Technologies.

Macmillan Learning has acquired Roberts and Company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Hobsons has acquired PAR’s technology framework for predictive analytics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Avnet has acquired IT training company ExitCertified. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“Oral Roberts University is now requiring all freshmen to wear tracking devices to monitor their physical activity,” News on 6 reports. “It appears as though school staff and instructors will be able to access the fitness tracking information gathered by the students’ devices. ‘The Fitbit trackers will feed into the D2L gradebook, automatically logging aerobics points,’” according to the university’s website.

The opening paragraphs from Education Week’s look at “the future of big data and analytics” in education: “Imagine classrooms outfitted with cameras that run constantly, capturing each child’s every facial expression, fidget, and social interaction, every day, all year long. Then imagine on the ceilings of those rooms infrared cameras, documenting the objects that every student touches throughout the day, and microphones, recording every word that each person utters. Picture now the children themselves wearing Fitbit-like devices that track everything from their heart rates to their time between meals.” Imagine.

Coffee shops in the UK that run Wi-Fi networks might have to store internet data under new snooping laws, The Guardian reports.

Via The Washington Post: “The U.S. Education Department’s new planned system of records that will collect detailed data on thousands of students – and transfer records to private contractors – is being slammed by experts who say there are not adequate privacy safeguards embedded in the project.”

“Vtech, having leaked 6.3m kids’ data, now wants to run your home security,” Boing Boing reports.

The Tor Project still has not been able to get an answer as to whether or not Carnegie Mellon University worked with the FBI in order to de-anonymize the Tor browser’s users.

Via Techcrunch: “In Letter To Google CEO, Sen. Franken Raises Questions Regarding Student Data Collection.” (Bill Fitzgerald has more questions.)

Data and “Research”

A report by the World Bank finds that the Internet might widen inequality “and even hasten the hollowing out of middle-class employment.”

Via the Delta Cost Project: “Trends in College Spending: 2003–2013.”

Via the Hechinger Report: “Using computers widens the achievement gap in writing, a federal study finds.”

The Pew Research Center has released a report on “privacy and information sharing.”

The NMC has released a Horizon Report for Chinese K–12 education.

The future of education, according to those asked to describe it by the Times of London, is pretty horrifying.

“An awful lot of districts don't know what textbooks are used in their schools,” says USC professor Morgan Polikoff.

Via Education Week: “Analytics: 4 Lessons Schools Can Learn From the NBA (and Vice Versa).”

S&P has some thoughts about the outlook for higher ed finances.

“Talking toys” for babies and toddlers actually get in the way of language learning, NPR reports.

For the first time, New York City’s high school graduation rate is over 70%.

Ars Technica reports on a study about discrimination in science: “Give teachers a physics test from a woman and they’ll give her worse grades.” NPR reports, however, that “Pretty Girls Make (Higher) Grades.”

“The Current State of Educational Blogging.”

Via Vox: “5 maps that show how sex education in the US is failing.”

Education Politics

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has released his higher education plan. Among its features: “Bush’s plan would eliminate the federal student loan program in its current form in favor of a new financing structure that is tied to students’ income. Under the plan, the federal government would provide each high school graduate with access to a $50,000 line of credit to pay for college or career training.”

Meanwhile, “The Obama Administration Proposes $2 Billion More In College Aid,” NPR reports. It’s asking, among other things, for the year-round Pell Grant to be re-instated.

Also in financial aid news: “The federal government has in recent months made several changes to the application process for federal financial aid, in an effort to make it easier and more straightforward. But one change – switching from a four-digit PIN for online access to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to a more standard and secure log-in identification and password – may be having the opposite effect,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail: “Ben Carson’s education platform shows his lack of policy knowledge,” according to The Hechinger Report.

Via Politico: “Even as the contaminated water crisis still rages in Flint, Michigan, Superintendent Bilal Tawwab says district officials are already preparing for an influx of young children entering school in the coming years with developmental, behavioral and cognitive challenges related to high levels of lead in the city's water supply.”

Via The New York Times: “The Department of Education said on Wednesday that it would create a searchable database that reveals the names of colleges and universities that have received exemptions on religious grounds from federal civil rights protections.”

According to Kentwired.com, “The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating Julio Pino, a Kent State associate history professor, for alleged involvement with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.”

Via WBEZ: “Backed by Gov. Bruce Rauner, top Illinois Republicans called Wednesday for a state takeover of the financially troubled Chicago Public Schools, which faces a nearly $1 billion budget deficit that could lead to thousands of teacher layoffs and a possible strike in a matter of months.”

Education in the Courts

A group of parents has filed a complaint with the Department of Education, claiming that the New York City charter school chain Success Academy has violated the civil rights of students with disabilities. (Meanwhile, WNYC reports that the SUNY Charter Institute will investigate the chain’s discipline practices.)

Via Inside Higher Ed: “A student who in 2014 sued Miami University in Ohio over inaccessible educational materials last week reached a settlement with the institution, according to court documents.”

“A state appeals court will rule on the high-profile Vergara lawsuit against the state and the California Teachers Association this spring,” EdSource reports. (The case involves several laws in California dealing with teacher tenure that, according to the plaintiffs in the case, harm students’ rights to an equal opportunity for an education.)

“Accreditors Seek to Challenge Consumer Bureau’s Power,” says Inside Higher Ed. Five national accrediting agencies and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation want to file a “friend of the court” brief, arguing that the CFPB does not have the authority to compel records from the accrediting agency that oversaw Corinthian Colleges as part of its inquiry into how the accreditation process works (or doesn’t work as the case may be).

Testing, Testing…

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that “GED changing pass score to better measure student performance.” I’m sure it’s to “better measures student performance” and not to respond to the abysmal results since the recent revamping of the test.

Via Education Week: “Score-report delays, technical glitches, and changes to the ACT, the SAT, and the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test are adding angst to an already stressful college-search process for some high school students around the country this school year.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs (a.k.a. Online Education)

Via the Coursera blog: “Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you’ll be asked to pay a fee (or apply for Coursera’s financial aid program) if you’d like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you’ll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments.”

Meanwhile on Campus

Taliban attackers opened fire in classrooms and dorms at the Bachan Khan University in Pakistan, killing at least 20.

The University of Cincinnati has reached a $5.3 million settlement with the family of Samuel DuBose, who was fatally shot last year by a campus police officer.

“Are At-Risk Students Bunnies to Be Drowned?” asks the Inside Higher Ed, referring to language used by the president of Mount St. Mary’s University, who reportedly said to faculty “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies… put a Glock to their heads.” More via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The US Defense Department is lifting its suspension on the University of Phoenix from the federal Tuition Assistance Program, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. That program provides aid to active-duty military.

Via Buzzfeed: “How Ivy League Admissions Are Stacked Against Poor Kids.”

“Might some colleges manage themselves into extinction?” asks The Hechinger Report.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Roxbury Community College has called off plans to privatize its information technology services department after Massachusetts auditors criticized the college for awarding a $3.4 million contract to do so without seeking bids.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The president of Oberlin College has rejected a group of black students’ demands aimed at dealing with racism on the Ohio campus, calling some of the demands ‘deeply troubling.’”

“Florida’s governor has called public university presidents to a meeting to ask why they can’t be sure graduates in their most popular majors will all be employed. His prime target is psychology,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

The Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory will merge, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Go, School Sports Team!

Via Vice: “Dan Majerle and Grand Canyon University Try to Join a College Hoops Club That Doesn’t Want Them.” (And via Tressie McMillan Cottom: “Sportsball and For-Profit Legitimacy.”)

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “They seemed like sensible changes: giving big-time college athletes, many of whom spend more than 40 hours a week on their sports, a true day off per week – certain hours when coaches couldn't make them practice – and more downtime after the season. But the ideas, part of a package of new rules proposed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, did not come up for a vote at the association's annual convention here on Friday. Instead, leaders of the five most powerful conferences resolved to vote on the measures next year, with the possibility of introducing a more comprehensive set of changes.” More via Inside Higher Ed.

From the HR Department

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Despite applying standards widely regarded as more union-friendly than those used by the board before, a regional NLRB official ruled on Tuesday that tenured and tenure-track faculty members at Carroll College, a Roman Catholic institution in Montana, are too involved in that institution’s management to be allowed to organize as employees.”

“Sara Goldrick-Rab is UW’s best-known tweeter,” says the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

According to the BBC, “Publisher Penguin Random House says job applicants will no longer be required to have a university degree.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

Scholastic announced it would withdraw the book A Birthday Cake for George Washington following complaints about its depiction of slavery.

Via Mindshift: “What ClassDojo Monsters Can Teach Kids About Growth Mindset.” According to that blog and others that repeated the company’s PR, the answer is apparently not “see how easily ‘growth mindset’ can be co-opted by a really insidious VC-funded version of behaviorism?”

Via Wired: “Apple and Microsoft May Use Cobalt Dug by Kids, Report Says.” Funny how this connection between children and computers never really gets discussed by ed-tech evangelists, eh?

“Turnitin, seeking to expand beyond plagiarism detection, launches a tool to help students improve their writing as they write,” Inside Higher Ed reports. Seize all the student IP, Turnitin.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo has released the “largest cache of Internet data” to university researchers.

The New York Times looks at how new lending companies utilize data science to determine consumers’ loan eligibility, something that raises questions about fairness and transparency (and something that ed-tech also needs to consider as/if it adopts algorithmic decision-making).

“EducationSuperHighway Debuts Tool to Compare Drastically Different District Broadband Rates,” Edsurge reports.

JSTOR’s e-book program is growing, Inside Higher Ed reports.

“Florida Virtual Schools and Knewton to Collaborate Using Analytics,” Education Week reports.

“Google Announces Virtual Reality App and Updates to ‘Expeditions Program,’” according to Edsurge.

The Moodle Users Association (MUA), “a crowd-funding group for additional Moodle core development,” says it’s open for members to join, reports Phil Hill, who adds that 42 have signed up “mostly as individuals.”

Via Doug Belshaw: “What a post-Persona landscape means for Open Badges.”

“Civitas Learning Moves to End Scheduling Nightmares,” says Edsurge. Learning analytics nightmares will continue.

“Benchprep Partners with ACT to Launch Personalized Online Test Prep Platform,” says Edsurge. “Personalized” review for a standardized test. LOL. Why, it's almost as though words have no meaning in ed-tech.

Funding and Acquisitions and Stock-Trading

Pearson released its “regular January trading update,” revealing its 2015 results and 2016 outlook. Last year, the education behemoth had an operating profit of approximately £720 million, but predicts that will be significantly lower this year. The company will lay off some 4000 employees, according to the BBC.

Microsoft has acquired MinecraftEdu – or rather TeacherGaming, the maker of a Minecraft version aimed at classroom usage. Microsoft will now launch an education version of Minecraft. More via Edsurge.

Flex Class has raised $2.5 million for a “sponsored MOOC platform.” Investors’ names were not disclosed.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

Via The Guardian: “In the library in the gym, Big Brother is coming to universities.”

And to make that crystal clear, here’s a press release rewrite via Campus Technology: “Toshiba Intros Surveillance Education Program.”

Data and “Research”

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “A survey of students on nine campuses has found that 21 percent of female undergraduates reported having been sexually assaulted since starting college.”

“Students Show Mixed Feelings Toward Advising Technology,” Edsurge says, based on research from the Columbia University Teachers College.

Inside Higher Ed has released the results of its 2016 survey of Chief Academic Officers.

Via Education Dive: “A new study from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) and the American Institutes for Research (AIR), published in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, claims that observing teachers in the classroom for the purpose of evaluation can ‘fail to meaningfully assess teacher performance.’”

“Nearly half of young people fear jobs will be automated in 10 years,” according to The Guardian.

The NYT’s Natasha Singer takes a closer look at ed-tech funding, noting that “Despite the volume of novel products aimed at schools, the biggest investments are largely going to start-ups focused on higher education or job-related skills – businesses that feed a market of colleges, companies and consumers willing to spend to promote career advancement.”

Knewton researchers claim Knewton works. News at 11.

Education Politics

“U.S. Education Department threatens to sanction states over test opt-outs,” according to The Washington Post.

President Obama has released a plan that would ban solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in federal prison.

The EFF asks why so many universities are opposing the Department of Education’s proposed OER policy (that federally funded educational resources would be openly licensed). One possible answer: patent$.

Proposed legislation before Georgia’s General Assembly would “require schools to provide certain information to students and parents prior to using any digital-learning platform; to provide for definitions; to provide for destruction of student data collected through a digital-learning platform; to provide the opportunity to opt out; to provide for legislative findings; to provide for related matters; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.”

Proposed legislation in Washington would allow charters in the state to keep operating – this after the state’s Supreme Court said that charters were unconstitutional.

Presidential candidate Chris Christie is the latest Republican to float the idea of shuttering the Department of Education.

The Pacific Standard looks at “The Right’s Opposition to Federal Education Reform.” (Or at least, to the Common Core.)

Education in the Courts

Via the FTC’s website: “The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against the operators of DeVry University, alleging that DeVry's advertisements deceived consumers about the likelihood that students would find jobs in their fields of study, and would earn more than those graduating with bachelor’s degrees from other colleges or universities.” More via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Colman Chadam carries genetic markers for cystic fibrosis, but doesn't have the disease itself, according to his parents.” Buzzfeed looks at the legal battle his parents are waging against a Palo Alto school district which dismissed him from a school, charging he posed a health risk to other students.

Via Reuters: “North Korea detains U.S. student on New Year trip for ‘hostile act’.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “A Pennsylvania appeals court has thrown out charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy against Pennsylvania State University’s former president, Graham B. Spanier, involving his role in the Sandusky child-sex-abuse case.”

Three executives from for-profit colleges have been sentenced “on charges related to student financial aid and student visa fraud,” says Inside Higher Ed.

Testing, Testing…

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The GED Testing Service … announced that it will lower the passing score for the GED, a test that serves as the equivalent of a high-school degree. At the same time the service, which Pearson and the American Council on Education own jointly, said it was adding two new, optional levels above the passing score (and the previous passing level) that will allow students to signify college readiness or to earn ACE recommendations for college credits.” More via NPR.

Via NPR: “A History Of The SAT In 4 Questions.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “New study suggests the SAT may over- or underpredict first-year college grades of hundreds of thousands of students.”

The AP reports“SAT tests canceled in China, Macau over cheating concerns.”

Via The New York Times: “Over 200 Educators in New York Receive Erroneous Scores Linked to Student Performance.”

Mills College is the latest school to go “test optional” for admissions.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs (a.k.a. Online Education)

Paul-Olivier Dehaye has filed a privacy complaint in 13 European regions against Coursera. Dehaye was involved in a MOOC controversy in 2014 when he deleted his course on the Coursera platform.

Inside Higher Ed’s Carl Straumsheim scrutinizes Coursera’s recent announcement about charging for courses/assessments/certificates. Warning: includes me.

(Walmart heirs’) Walton Family Foundation says it’s time to “rethink online learning.” Whatever that means. For-profit online charter school chain K12 Inc is also launching a charitable foundation “designed to advance online and blended learning opportunities and outcomes.” Be afraid.

Via the Center for Digital Education: “The Struggle to Make Online Courses Accessible in Higher Ed.”

Via The New York Times: “Europe’s Top Digital-Privacy Watchdog Zeros In on U.S. Tech Giants.”

Meanwhile on Campus

Via Fusion: “Remember #AssaultAtSpringValley? A teen arrested in the incident speaks out.”

Via the AP: “Rivier University, which has a total student population of about 2,600 in Nashua, has created an ‘Employment Promise Program’ that will be available to full-time undergraduates starting with the class of 2020. Students are guaranteed to land a job within nine months of graduation, or the school will either pay their federally subsidized students loans for up to a year or enroll them in up to six master’s degree courses tuition-free.”

Via Eater: “Students at the University of Kentucky now have the distinct privilege of being able to get college credit for eating tacos. According to Munchies, the university is offering an undergraduate class called ‘Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the US South,’ and the professor behind it wants to use tacos as an avenue for students to learn more about how people can forge social connections through food.”

“The American Bar Association is investigating a complaint that Brigham Young University's law school violates the group's nondiscrimination guidelines by maintaining policies that allow the expulsion of students for being homosexual or for losing their Mormon faith before graduation,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Via The New York Times: “Success Academy Founder Defends Schools Against Charges of Bias.”

“Yik Yak Tests Universities’ Defense Of Free Speech,” says NPR.

For-profit Westwood College announced it would close its doors in March.

Four people were killed at a school shooting in Saskatchewan.

Via the AP: “Pakistan closes schools in province amid Taliban threats.”

Via NPR: “The Citadel Punishes 14 Cadets Over White-Hooded Photos.”

“Colleges That Ask Applicants About Brushes With the Law Draw Scrutiny,” according to The New York Times.

“Should Harvard Rename Med School for $1 Billion?”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “College Endowments Report Lowest Return Rate in 3 Years.” But via The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “U.S. Colleges Raise $40 Billion; Stanford Tops List at $1.6 Billion.”

Oxford University’s Oriel College says it will not remove its statute of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

Via Bryan Alexander: “One midwestern university has responded to declining enrollment in a very specific way. Lake Superior State University … is apparently denying tenure to tenure-track faculty in some cases because the campus cannot afford to grant long-term employment to them.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Baltimore Ravens player John Urschel will spend the off-season working on his PhD at MIT.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Colleges Raised $1.2 Billion in Donations for Sports in 2015.” #GoDucks

Former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has joined the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Via Sports Illustrated: Shaq says he was ‘paid very well’ while playing at LSU. (I guess this is something that the O’Neals are weighing as Shaq’s oldest son is being recruited by various colleges.)

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Nearly One-Quarter of College Athletes Report Signs of Depression.”

Amherst will drop its racist mascot, Lord Jeff.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The University of Rhode Island has agreed to pay $1.45 million to the family of a baseball player who died after collapsing during a team workout in 2011.”

From the HR Department

Via The Telegraph: “Pearson chief brands critics ‘naive and ignorant’ as company cuts 4,000 jobs.” Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. (Elsewhere in Pearson news, the company was hit with an Ofsted report that ranked it “inadequate” and found “no key strengths” in its apprenticeship program.)

MIT’s dean for graduate education, Christine Ortiz, is taking a one year leave in order to start a new research university. “‘I’m looking at a new model, where the whole sort of vocabulary is different,’ she said. ‘The distinction between undergrad and grad goes away.’ Ortiz said the university would focus on project-based learning and would dispense with some of the familiar hallmarks of university education, like the lecture.”

Not a good week for Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who was caught on camera during protests last year asking journalists to stop filming. She’s been charged with assault, and she’s been suspended from her job.

Elsewhere at Mizzou: “The University of Missouri will raise the minimum stipend for graduate students, to $15,000, in July, the interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley, announced on Wednesday,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. And also via The Chronicle: “Former Mizzou Chief Blames Others for Resignation in ‘Confidential’ Letter.”

Via the Chicago Sun-Times: “Wheaton College faculty council opposes effort to fire professor.”

Via Bloomberg Business: “Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?”

Upgrades and Downgrades

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations.”

Oh look. A(nother) new interoperability standard for ed-tech. Cue xkcd.

“Angry Birds creator Rovio has spun out its education operations into a new company under the name of Fun Academy,” Gamasutra reports.

“Instructure and Echo360 To Get Tighter Integration for Student Activity Reporting,” says Campus Technology.

Blackboard announced the “availability of new SaaS offerings,” Michael Feldstein reports.

Via Edsurge: “Bloomboard Releases Micro-Credentials Offering and ‘Pinterest for Teachers’.” Whatever happened to all those other startups that were supposed to be “Pinterest for Teachers”?

“Does Technology Ever Reduce the Costs of Teaching?”

Via The New York Times: “An App Helps Teachers Track Student Attendance.”

Education Week has an update on what happened to the millions that LeVar Burton raised via Kickstarter to reboot Reading Rainbow as an app.

Via Edsurge: “panOpen Launches OER Platform to Reduce Textbook Costs.”

Funding and Acquisitions

Apple has acquired LearnSprout, a company that initially worked on API- and SIS-integration tools (but that had recently pivoted to an analytics dashboard). Edsurge surmises that the acquisition will help Apple with new iOS features that promise to better integrate devices and apps into school administrative tools. (It's not clear to me what happens to all the student data LearnSprout had accumulated. Were these "assets" also acquired?)

Grovo has raised $40 million from Accel Partners, Costanoa Venture Capital, SoftTech VC, Greg Waldorf, and Vayner Capital. The “workplace learning” company has raised $62.02 million total.

TAL Education, a Chinese tutoring company, has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the mind-reading software Knewton.

ProctorFree has raised an undisclosed amount of money from Task Force X Capital. The startup is “an automated service that uses biometric and machine learning technologies to eliminate the need for human oversight in online exams” which doesn’t sound horrifying at all.

Edsurge looks at New Markets Venture Partners new venture fund.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“More Security Vulnerabilities Found in Hello Barbie Toy’s Servers.”

Via Education Dive: “The University of Virginia is dealing with the aftermath of a data breach that exposed the W–2s of about 1,400 employees and the direct deposit banking information of another 40.”

Via Education Week: “The Clarksdale, Miss., school board has approved the use of drones for educational purposes” (which in this case means filming athletic events).

Data and “Research”

Via The New York Times: “What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us.”

Via Politico: “In an SEC filing, Navient reports that total delinquency rates are at the lowest levels for FFELP and private education loans since 2005.”

Eduventures has published a report on the learning management system market.

“Kaplan Test Prep Survey: Percentage of College Admissions Officers Who Check Out Applicants' Social Media Profiles Hits New High.”

Via Education Week: “Per Pupil Spending Down in Most States.” At the higher education level, “State support for higher education is up 4.1 percent this year, according to a new report,” that is, according to Inside Higher Ed. And via The Hechinger Report: “Education spending gap widens between college haves and have-nots since recession.”

Via a story published on Medium about female tech founders: “In the Bay Area, 16 companies that received A funding in 2015 were led by a female CEO, or 8% of the total. This represents a 30% year-over-year decrease in the number of female-led companies that raised an A in the Bay Area compared with 2014.”

According to a study by Duke, “Charter school segregation worsens in North Carolina.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Students waste about one-fifth of class time on laptops, smartphones and tablets, even though they admit such behavior can harm their grades.”

Which states allow guns on campus?

This is the tenth and final article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Who’s Funded/Who’s Funding

In February of this year, Techcrunch, one of the original Silicon Valley-focused tech blogs, looked back on venture funding during 2014 and pronounced that an ed-tech investment revival was underway. But by June, Techcrunch had changed its tune, proclaiming that funding for ed-tech startups was drying up: “Investors Rethink EdTech As Dealflow Declines.”

2015 has actually been a record-setting year for ed-tech investment if you look at the total dollar figures. Investment analyst firm CB Inights wrote this summer (just a month after Techcrunch’s doom-filled article) that “the period from 2010 to 2014 saw more than a 503% growth in investment dollars.”

“Ka-ching!” – Edsurge

What’s striking to me isn’t so much that Techcrunch got it right or wrong when it looked at investment numbers from the first half of the year and extrapolated what was happening in the sector. What’s interesting, I think, is that, with all the data at its disposal, this is the narrative that Techcrunch chose to tell: one of wariness, hesitancy. Like many industry observers – investors and journalists alike – Techcrunch appears ready for the ed-tech boom to turn to ed-tech bust once again. You can sense it in their commentary: education is a really “tough space.”

Techcrunch is also the owner of Crunchbase, a crowdsourced database that tracks who in the technology sector has received venture funding. (More accurately, I suppose, Techcrunch and Crunchbase are owned by AOL.) Crunchbase is not a perfect record; as I said, it’s crowdsourced, relying on entrepreneurs and analysts entering funding data in order to keep it up-to-date. But the data on Crunchbase is freely available. And that does set it apart from many other venues that charge for the data and the analysis about investments. (Like this one, for example: market research firm MarketsandMarkets claimed this summer that “the global Education Technology (Ed Tech) and Smart Classrooms Market is expected to grow from USD 43.27 Billion in 2015 to USD 93.76 Billion in 2020.” But the report will cost you almost $5000, so all I can really say is that the market for selling data about ed-tech remains strong.)

Me, I want to be able to see the data itself.

At the beginning of the year, I started to keep track of all the funding reports news I came across. I wanted to make this data openly available in turn. (You can find the site and the GitHub repo that powers it at matrix.hackeducation.com.) It’s important to “show your work” when it comes to these sorts of reports, I believe, because the figures and the analyses from various sources always differ wildly. This is partly based on “what counts” as ed-tech. Again, it’s not so much a matter of right or wrong; it’s more the kind of narrative that frames or is framed by the data.

My calculations differ from, say, Edsurge’s, which recently published its look back at funding in 2015 for US startups. Here’s its list of the “Top 10 US edtech deals in 2015”:

1. HotChalk ($230 million)
2. Lynda.com ($186 million)
3. Udacity ($105 million)
4. AltSchool ($100 million)
5. General Assembly ($70 million)
6. Udemy ($65 million)
7. Coursera ($61.1 million)
8. Civitas Learning ($60 million)
9. Varsity Tutors ($50 million)
10. Duolingo and Sphero (tied with $45 million each)

Here’s my list of the 20 biggest deals this year:

1. Social Finance ($1 billion)
2. Earnest ($275 million)
3. HotChalk ($230 million)
4. Social Finance ($200 million)
5. TutorGroup ($200 million)
6. Lynda.com ($186 million)
7. Hujang.com ($157 million)
8. Udacity ($105 million)
9. 17zuoye and AltSchool (tied with $100 million each)
10. Xioazhan Jiaoyu ($84 million)
11. General Assembly ($70 million)
12. Udemy ($65 million)
13. Yuantiku ($60 million)
14. Civitas Learning ($60 million)
15. NetDragon Education ($52.5 million)
16. Genshuixue and Varsity Tutors (tied with $50 million each)
17. Coursera ($49.5 million)
18. Knewton ($47.25 million)
19. Ortbotix and Duolingo (tied with $45 million each)
20. LittleBits ($44.2 million)

My list includes investments outside the US – doing so highlights the booming market in China. Mine also includes Social Finance and Earnest, two companies that specialize in private student loans. While Edsurge says it’s excluding those that aren’t focused on “learner outcomes,” I think it’s important to recognize investors’ interest in the student loan sector, particularly as these companies increasingly partner with coding bootcamps.

These numbers demonstrate that there were some giant funding rounds this year. (When Lynda.com announced its $186 million round in January, it was hailed as the largest the sector had seen in the past five years.) As Edsurge notes in its analysis of the year’s funding, these big numbers do skew things: “These record-setting numbers may be deceptive as a large percentage of funding is concentrated among a small number of companies.”

Edsurge finds that seed and angel rounds of funding have increased in size and number, but it notes that the number of Series A and B rounds has fallen. “This increase suggests that investors are becoming more reluctant to invest in Series B deals,” it says (echoing what Techcrunch observed in June), adding that this might be “a symptom, perhaps, of early investor darlings’ seeming failure to establish a core business model?” Perhaps.

Here’s my list of the most well-funded education technology startups:

1. Social Finance ($1.37 billion)
2. TutorGroup ($315 million)
3. Earnest ($299.1 million)
4. HotChalk ($235 million)
5. Hujang.com ($187 million)
6. D2L ($165 million)
7. Pluralsight ($162.5 million)
8. Udacity ($160 million)
9. Coursera ($146.1 million)
10. 17zuoye ($135 million)

Again, this list differs quite a bit with one that The Chronicle of Education, with Edsurge’s help, published in October.

In April, Pitchbook, another investment database listed the most valuable ed-tech companies. According to its calculations, those were Pluralsight (valued at $1 billion), Instructure (valued at $554 million), Lynda.com (valued at $46 million), Coursera (valued at $367 million), Open English (valued at $350 million), Sympoz (valued at $339 million), D2L (valued at $330 million), Lumos Labs (valued at $265 million), Clever (valued at $247 million), and Edmodo (valued at $236 million). Following its investment this year, Udacity would certainly now be near the top of that list, as it became a “unicorn,” that is a company valued at $1 billion.

So what’s popular among investors? Test prep. Tutoring. Private student loans. Learning management systems. Online “skills training.”

The most active investors in ed-tech this year include Learn Capital, Kapor Capital, New Enterprise Associates, NewSchools Venture Fund, Owl Ventures, 500 Startups, and Rethink Education. German media company Bertelsmann was involved in two of the biggest investment rounds this year: Udacity and HotChalk. The same could be said for Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Udacity and AltSchool. A special shout-out to celebrities Carmelo Anthony and Adam Levine who both invested in ed-tech startups this year.

VC Funding (Some Context)

To put things in a little perspective:

Despite its record-breaking year, ed-tech only receives a fraction of all VC funding and the “big deals” in ed-tech are dwarfed by those seen in the rest of the tech sector. Uber alone has raised almost $5 billion this year, for example.

Via The New York Times: “Nearly two-thirds of the top 71 investment funds have no women as senior investment team members, according to the data compiled by the Social and Capital Partnership and the Information, a news site. Roughly 30 percent of those funds have a senior investment team that is composed entirely of white members.”

Recommended reading: Tad Friend’s profile in The New Yorker of investor Marc Andreessen: Tomorrow’s Advance Man.

Meanwhile: “Is Silicon Valley Driving Teachers Out?” The Atlantic reported in July that, “As housing costs in America’s tech hub continue to soar, local educators are finding it tough to stay and work in the area.”

Beyond VC Funding

“US education is a $1.5 trillion industry and growing at 5 percent annually,” McKinsey wrote excitedly this summer. Of course, venture capital is just one source of the money that’s pouring into ed-tech. There’s government funding, of course. There’s personal spending. And there’s lots and lots of “philanthropy.”

The Gates Foundation is perhaps the most famous of these philanthropic organizations, having spent billions of dollars pushing various education initiatives. In October, Bill Gates gave what Education Week observed was “his first major speech on education in seven years,” and indicated his foundation would “double down” on teacher preparation and common academic standards.

The other two giants in education foundations: the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

In September, the LA Times obtained a memo written by the Broad Foundation, outlining its $490 million plan to put half of LAUSD students in charter schools. The memo “lays out a strategy for moving forward, including how to raise money, recruit and train teachers, provide outreach to parents and navigate the political battle that will probably ensue.” It cites several large foundations and California multi-millions who could be tapped for more financial support.

And this underscores one of the major criticisms of these philanthropic efforts: they are profoundly anti-democratic. As John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker earlier this month, “people like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can.”

Zuckerberg’s name is next to Gates’ in that sentence because he has signed the “Giving Pledge,” Gates’ and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet’s challenge to the 1% to give away at least half of their wealth. After the birth of his daughter this fall, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan wrote her a letter (and posted it on Facebook, of course). In covering the contents of the letter, the New York Times got the headline totally wrong: “Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares for Charity.” The paper later clarified that it’s not a charity but an LLC– a “$45 billion tax loophole,” some suggested. Headlines from Gawker: “Mark Zuckerberg Will Donate Massive Fortune to Own Blinkered Worldview.” And from Rolin Moe: “You’re Not an Asshole, Mark Zuckerberg. You’re Just Wrong..”

Among the projects that the new Zuckerberg Chan Initiative will fund: “personalized learning” (whatever the hell that means).

Zuckerberg’s interest in such a thing is no doubt connected to investments that he’s already made – in the private school AltSchool, for example. And in September, Facebook announced that it had been working on building software for the Summit charter school chain. “Facebook’s move into education may be unexpected, but it seems to be sincere,” wrote The Verge’s Casey Newton about the collaboration in an article that’s not much more than a “longform expanded version of the Facebook press release.”

Joining Gates and Zuckerberg in venture philanthropy is Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. Her organization, the Emerson Collective, announced a campaign – XQ: The Super School Project– to get folks to “rethink high school.” 5 of the “best ideas” will receive a share of the $50 million Jobs has earmarked for the project. The Emerson Collective also invested in AltSchool and Udacity this year to give you an idea of what “best ideas” might look like.

“I can conceive of no greater mistake… than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice” – William Jewett Tucker

Incubating Startups

One way to judge interest in ed-tech startups is to look at the amount of funding. Another way might be to count the number of accelerator programs. And wow, did these ever proliferate this year.

Even the the Pope jumped in on this, launching an education accelerator program called Scholas Labs in February..

Other new incubator/accelerator programs: In March, Edukwest reported that“Don Burton, former Managing Director of the Kaplan/Techstars EdTech Accelerator, and Jonathan D. Harber, co-founder and CEO of Schoolnet, [have] teamed up to launch a new edtech accelerator program in New York.” In April, SIIA’s education division announced the participants in its “Innovation Incubator Program.” One of them is some tiny little tech company called Adobe. Speaking of little tech companies, Intel launched an Education Accelerator. So did AT&T, with Edusrge’s CEO Betsy Corcoran and Udacity’s CEO Sebastian Thrun sitting on the Board of Directors. The University of Virginia Curry School of Education launched one in February. BoomStartup, run by “former Pearson pals,” according to Edsurge, launched one in April. The venture capital fund NewSchool Venture Fund launched one in July. Also launching in July two new incubators in Southeast Asia: Topica EdTechLab in Hanoi and Lithan EdTech Accelerator in Singapore.

These all join other existing accelerators, including ImagineK12, LearnLaunch, and 1776.

There’s actually little proof that these programs actually help startups, but hey.

Startups For Sale

There were plenty of predictions this year that all this investment would result in exits – that is, IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions – that would “defy historical trends.” The education sector is “hot” for these sorts of deals, one investment banker said in August.

The big one: LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion.

Brentwood Associates bought Excelligence. inRESONANCE bought SchoolYard. Hack Reactor bought MakerSquare. Pluralsight bought Code School. Fingerprint bought Cognitive Kid and Scribble Press. Google bought Launchpad Toys. Blackboard bought SchoolWires. Sibling Group bought Urban Planet Mobile. Alma bought Always Prepped. Elsevier bought Newsflo. The Advisory Board Company bought GradesFirst. Renaissance Learning bought UClass. Hobsons bought Starfish Retention Systems. Harris School Solutions bought Classmate. Embibe bought 100Marks. Rakuten bought Overdrive. Popexpert bought Online Marketing Institute. Bonnier Business Press bought Clio Online. Valore bought Boundless. Proquest bought SIPX. After College bought Collegefeed. The Learning House bought Software Craftsmanship Guild. Rizk Ventures bought Classroom 24–7. XSEED Education bought Pleolabs. Ellucian bought Helix Education’s LMS. Blackboard bought Remote Learner UK. TES Global bought Unijobs. EBSCO bought Learning Express. Oxford University Press bought bab.la. Proquest bought MyLibrary and OASIS. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought Scholastic’s ed-tech business. TAL Education Group bought Gaokaopai. Sandbox Partners bought Pearson’s Family Entertainment Network. The Learning House bought Acatar. Automattic bought WooThemes. Oxford University Press bought Epigeum. TES Global bought Hibernia College UK. West Corporation bought SharpSchool. Learnbrite bought Chatmapper. Pearson VUE bought ProctorCam. Vista Equity bought PowerSchool. Techstars bought UP Global and the Startup Weekend franchise. gphomestay bought Brooks Institute. Kuepa bought First Class. Simplilearn bought Market Motive. Level Data bought Student Sync. Safari Media bought Popforms. Data Recognition Corporation bought McGraw-Hill Education’s testing business. Apollo Education Group bought Iron Yard. Blackboard bought X-Ray Analytics. Recruit Holdings bought Quipper. TargetX bought Uversity (formerly known as Inigral). Pluralsight bought Hackhands. NetDragon bought Promethean. Atomic Learning bought Versifit Technologies. Nikkei bought The Financial Times from Pearson. Unizin bought Courseload. Civitas Learning bought BlikBook. Noodle bought AllClasses.com. Blackbaud bought Smart Tuition. Blackboard bought Nivel Siete. Affirm bought LendLayer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought MeeGenius. Education Week bought Learning Matters. TPG Capital bought Ellucian. Perceivant bought Bearface Instructional Technologies. 21st Century Fox bought National Geographic. Education Corporation of America bought some Kaplan Higher Education campuses. EnglishCentral bought Langrich. Cengage Learning bought Learning Objects. TAL Education bought FirstLeap. Gutenberg Technology bought Neodemia. Joel Klein and other Amplify executives bought Amplify from News Corp. Hack Reactor bought Mobile Makers Academy. Principled Technologies bought WeeJee Learning. Work Day bought Media Core. ProQuest bought Ex Libris. Bibliotheca bought 3M’s library division. Cengage Learning bought Pathbrite. PowerSchool bought InfoSnap. Cross Street LLC bought Double Line Partners, developers of the Ed-Fi data framework. Blackboard bought Blue Canary. Open English bought Next University. Apollo Education bought Career Partner GmbH.

A few comments on this long list of acquisitions:

• I hadn’t heard of the vast majority of these companies – either the ones being bought or the ones doing the buying.
• Pearson sold The Financial Times and its share in The Economist in order to focus “100%” on its global education strategy. It also sold PowerSchool, so it appears its global education strategy will remain textbooks and standardized testing. It’s struggled quite a bit with both this years, losing major testing contracts in Texas and New York and losing textbook contracts with several major UK universities. I’ll have more to say about Pearson’s year in the “failure” section below. Congrats, Pearson.
• I’ll also have more to say about Amplify in that “failure” section. Congrats, Amplify.
• Despite a “brain drain” at Blackboard (really, layoffs at all levels of the company), the learning management system company continues to buy startups, particularly those that offer “predictive analytics.” Blackboard is also seeking to expand its business outside the US, buying three Moodle-related startups. I’ll say more about Blackboard in the “stock market” section below too. Congrats, Blackboard.
• The library technology space saw a great deal of consolidation this year, with ProQuest making several major acquisitions.
• As I’ve written about previously, for-profit higher education companies are interested in buying coding bootcamps. The “skills training” market is really hot – for investment and acquisition.
• Private equity firms sure love buying ed-tech companies. Perhaps because the stock market’s sorta “meh” about them.

IPOs and Education Companies on the Stock Market

According to Techcrunch, 2015 was the “Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009.” Bad timing, I guess, for all those education startups who were hopeful about their IPO chances, following 2U’s successful public offering last year. It’s still much more likely that a big education company will gobble up a little education company than go public.

There was just one education IPO this year: Instructure. Okay, there were two if you count IAC’s Match Group, which does own The Princeton Review and Tutor.com (along with Tinder and Match.com, of course). Don’t ever change, ed-tech.

Two other education companies filed for an IPO in 2015 but have not yet started trading publicly: the world’s biggest for-profit education company, Laureate Education, and textbook publisher McGraw Hill Education. And CL Educate, which announced it would IPO last year, deferred those plans.

One of the interesting side benefits of companies going public is that they have to disclose their financials. One insight from Instructure’s IPO filing: “Sales and marketing spending, as a percentage of total revenues, reached 136 percent in 2012 (the S–1 does not include information prior to 2012). Even though Instructure has seen a fivefold increase in revenue since then, spending on sales and marketing has hovered at around 80 percent since 2013.”

Blackboard, once also publicly traded, was acquired by a private equity firm in 2011, so its financials are kept private. Reuters reported in July that the company was going up for sale, as its owner was seeking $3.4 billion for it. The news prompted quitea bit of speculation– but no buyer. Blackboard suffers from messaging problems according to Mindwire Consulting’s Michael Feldstein. But more damning, perhaps, it suffers from “complexity problems” according to former Bb employee George Kroner.

I included a bunch of snapshots of the stock performance from various for-profit education companies in an earlier article in this series. (Spoiler alert: pretty poor.) I’ll include a few more here from other publicly traded ed-tech companies:

Closures and Bankruptcies and Utter Failures

Although startups are notoriously short-lived – 80%–90% fail in their first year – most of the major failures this year came from big education companies, not little one. There were a handful of ed-tech startups entering the deadpool, sure. But the names of the companies that really stumbled in 2015 were big names – RadioShack, for example, which filed bankruptcy at the beginning of the year. They were companies that had raised a lot of money – The Washington Post reported in May that Thinkgate LLC had closed its doors “after receiving millions in Race to the Top funds.”

Last year, I dedicated a whole article to the failures in ed-tech. The massive disaster surrounding LAUSD’s iPad implementation (among other things) surely warranted the scrutiny.

The fallout from LAUSD continued this year, with Pearson eventually reaching a settlement with the district this fall to the tune of $6.45 million – a reimbursement for the flawed vaporware curriculum that was to come pre-installed on those iPads. (There haven’t been any public announcements about the FBI investigation or the SEC inquiry into the procurement process that gave Apple and Pearson the deal with LAUSD in the first place.)

Back in 2013, it was the entrance of News Corp’s education company Amplify into the hardware market that drew headlines – positive and negative. “News Corp’s Education Tablet May Be the Bureaucratic Fit Schools Need to Adopt Tech,” wrote Techcrunch’s Greg Ferenstein (who also authored one of those great “iPads will revolutionize education” stories way back in 2011). From the get-go, Amplify struggled with sales and with implementation and with PR. (It probably didn’t help that it was also closely identified with another massive ed-tech failure, inBloom.) Overheating chargers, along with quick-to-break devices, plagued its much ballyhooed tablet rollout in Guilford County, North Carolina, and the district put the initiative on pause. Guilford County did (finally) get its Amplify tablet initiative up and running this year. Just in time for Amplify to implode.

The signs were there for a while (although not everyone seemed to see them): “News Corp.’s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures,” Bloomberg reported in April. “Rupert Murdoch’s Education Company Will Stop Making Tablets,” Buzzfeed reported in June. “News Corp. Planning to Sell Off Money-Losing Education Unit,” The New York Times reported in August.

In September, News Corp sold Amplify to Amplify’s management team, including Joel Klein. Terms of the deal were not disclosed (but I bet it was less than the $360 million that News Corp spent to buy Wireless Generation back in 2010).

Education: yup, it’s a “tough space,” alright. Of course, it doesn’t help when ed-tech is so awful.

The Ethics of the Business of Ed-Tech

In April, The New York Times’ William Cohan asked venture capitalists about the ethical responsibility they might have for the investments they make. The query was specifically related to Yik Yak, which as I noted in a previous article in this series was surely one the most controversial technologies on schools this year.

Do venture capitalists and other highly sophisticated and compensated investors, like those controlling large private equity and hedge funds, have any moral or ethical responsibility for the investments they make?

Should the smart-money crowd be held accountable for the harm caused to people who use the products and services created with the money that springs from their coffers?

Or is the bottom line the only thing that matters when it comes to investing?

Cohan reached out to Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz who was responsible for the investment that firm made in Yik Yak. (The startup has raised $73.5 million total.) Goetz did not answer Cohan’s questions beyond the boilerplate answers about how the app facilitates connection and community.

Beyond that, Mr. Goetz directed me to Hilary McQuaide, Yik Yak’s new director of communications. As one would expect, her answers were filled with the usual corporate pablum. Was there anything else she could help me with, Ms. McQuaide wondered? Why yes, I answered: I would still like to hear from Mr. Goetz on the question of what responsibility venture capitalists bear, if any, for financing companies that encourage anonymous cyberbullying? I am still waiting.

I’d add to Cohan’s line of questioning a few more things specifically related to education: what are the responsibilities for investors when it comes to products and services that will, in all likelihood, exacerbate educational inequalities? Are there any obligations to verify if the wildclaimsmade by entrepreneurs during pitch meetings are actually true?

No doubt, these questions are something journalists need to consider too.

Too often, journalists become PR wings of the tech industry, simply repeating those wild claims that entrepreneurs have made to their investors and potential customers. “Mind-reading robo tutors in the sky!” In all fairness, as the Department of Labor reported last year, there are almost 6 PR professionals in the US to every 1 journalist, and so it can be challenging to wade through all the bullshit.

But technology journalism and education technology journalism tend to suffer not just from too much credulity when it comes to the stories they write. There’s an a priori that many of publications operate under: that technology is necessary; that technology is inevitable; that technology makes things better. These publications are advocates for technology (and by extension for the technology industry) and very rarely ask difficult questions of it.

Many of these publications are also funded by the technology industry. As I noted earlier in this article, AOL owns Techcrunch. Among those the Gates Foundation funds (or has funded): The Hechinger Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, and Edsurge. For its part, Edsurge announced earlier this month that it had raised $2.8 million in venture capital from 1776.vc and the Omidyar Network. It’s raised $5.66 million total (that’s excluding Gates Foundation money) from many of the major ed-tech investors: NewSchools Venture Fund, Learn Capital, GSV Capital, and others.

These publications insist they retain editorial control over their content. But there’s no escaping the ideological bent of their ed-tech coverage.

In June, Edsurge announced a new “concierge” service, whereby companies can pay the publication to promote them to schools’ procurement teams. Edsurge takes a cut of any contracts awarded. There are lots of questions here about ethics, I think– journalistic and otherwise. But the move shouldn’t be that much of a surprise as the ed-tech industry has long complained that schools’ procurement processes are highly flawed, and Edsurge has positioned itself as a key information broker in the market.

With all the funding and all the products flooding the space, how do teachers and students and parents learn about ed-tech? Well, other than reading industry-funded publications, they could attend industry-funded events, I suppose. (ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, still boasts one of the biggest ed-tech conferences. It named Jim Flanagan its new chief learning officer this year. Flanagan was previously the National Director of Sales at Amplify.)

EdCamp, which once positioned itself as a “grassroots” professional development event, has itself become increasingly astro-turfed. The organization behind EdCamps raised venture funding from NewSchools Venture Fund last year, and this year it received a $2 million grant from the Gates Foundation. (The news prompted Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez to pen an “open letter” to Edcamps.) Here’s director Hadley Ferguson’s advice to startups: “How to Get Your Name into the Minds and Hearts of Teachers.” (Spoiler alert: give EdCamp money or swag.)

All the Best Ed-Tech Narratives Money Can Buy

All this business. All this disruptive innovation. It’s just magnific… Wait, what? Academic research challenging Clayton Christensen’s famous business school concept outlined in The Innovator’s Dilemma and applied to education in Disrupting Class and The Innovative University and invoked by just about every ed-tech entrepreneur and investor ever? Oh yes please.

Jill Lepore had already skewered the idea in The New Yorker last year. I wrote a little something on the topic back in 2013.

But now, as The Chronicle of Education wrote in September,

a new paper, the most extensive test yet of Christensen’s theory, may prove more difficult to dismiss. Andrew A. King, a professor at the Dartmouth College business school, and Baljir Baatartogtokh, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, spent two years digging into disruption, interviewing scores of experts, trying to determine whether 77 of Christensen’s own examples conformed to his theory, studies involving big names like Ford, McDonald’s, and Google, along with lesser-known makers of blood-glucose meters and blended plastics. Only a tiny minority – 9 percent – fit Christensen’s criteria. Disruption is real but rare, King and Baatartogtokh conclude, which suggests that it’s at best a marginally useful explanation of how innovation happens.

King says he’s not out to take down Christensen, although that may be what he’s done. Instead, he wants to prove a point. “A theory is like a weed,” King says. “Unless it is pruned back by empirical testing, it will grow to fill any void.”

Much like the business of ed-tech…

Education Politics

“Clinton: ‘I Wouldn’t Keep Any School Open That Wasn’t Doing A Better Than Average Job.’” No schools in Lake Wobegon will be required to close.

“Creationist Sylvia Allen to lead Arizona Senate education panel.” What could go wrong?

Via the Hechinger Report: “As he leaves the U.S. Department of Education, the leader of its Office of Ed Tech appeals for greater equity.”

“Hundreds of thousands of college students who were deceived about the terms of their debit cards by Higher One Holdings will receive a total of $55 million in restitution, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve” announced this week.

“What If Social Media Becomes 16-Plus?” asks danah boyd, scrutinizing a proposed law in the EU that would allow countries to restrict children’s access to the Internet.

Education in the Courts

“The FTC has settled COPPA violation cases with two small app developers with civil penalties totaling $360,000,” according to Gamasutra.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the University of New Hampshire’s 2013 firing of Marco Dorfsman, an associate professor of Spanish, after he admitted to altering a colleague’s student evaluations.”

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Mattel, ToyTalk, and kidSAFE, alleging that Hello Barbie (the new surveillance Barbie) violates COPPA.

Testing, Testing…

“ESSA’s Flexibility on Assessment Elicits Qualms From Testing Experts,” says Education Week.

Statewide participation in the new PARCC exams was 97%, according to California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

“Less than 1 percent of the learners in the massive open online course partnership between Arizona State University and edX are eligible to earn credit for their work, according to enrollment numbers from the inaugural courses,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “Dean Dad” Matt Reed weighs in. Meanwhile: “Starbucks Partnership With ASU Benefits Education Giant Pearson.”

“In a Fake Online Class With Students Paid to Cheat, Could Professors Catch the Culprits?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Coursera has released the list of its most popular courses in 2015. Topping the list: “Learning How to Learn.”

Class Central has released its report on 2015 MOOC enrollment: “The MOOC space essentially doubled this year. More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years of the modern MOOC space’s existence.”

Meanwhile on Campus

NYU continues to be awful. Two stories side-by-side: “N.Y.U. President’s Penthouse Gets a Face-Lift Worth $1.1 Million (or More),” The New York Times reports. “NYU Apologizes For Telling Low-Income Student They Probably Can't Afford Grad School,” Buzzfeed writes.

“This year, students at the University of Cape Town successfully pushed for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist tycoon seen by many as an architect of apartheid. Oxford University, in the country of his birth, might be next,” The New York Times reports. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has an opinion, and the BBC is on it. According to Inside Higher Ed, Oxford’s Oriel College has started the process of taking down a plague honoring Rhodes.

Students at Oberlin are protesting the food on campus.

Via Buzzfeed: “The Indian government has advised citizens enrolled in two small California colleges to temporarily defer travel to the U.S., after the country's state-owned airline said it has been warned by U.S. officials that the schools are under investigation.”

In Pocatello, Idaho, “Lunch lady fired for giving free lunch to hungry student.”

Via Boing Boing: “In Texas, a 12 year old Sikh boy was arrested for ‘terrorism’ over a solar charger.”

The New York Times profiles Y Roads: “Program Offers Classes and Support for Young Adults Who Didn’t Finish High School”

The Pacific Standard reports that “Millions of Students Attend Schools in ‘Potential Impact Zones’ for Oil Train Disasters.”

“Most New York City Elementary Schools Are Violating Disabilities Act,” according to The New York Times.

Go, School Sports Team!

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The National Collegiate Athletic Association ruled Tuesday that the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s men’s basketball staff violated several NCAA rules in recent years, including falsifying admissions forms for an international student who did not meet the financial requirements to obtain a visa.”

From the HR Department

“Why James Billington’s Retirement is a Wake-Up Call for Librarians” by Peter Brantley.

The National Labor Relations Board will consider whether grad students at Columbia University are entitled to unionize.

Adjuncts at Brandeis University have voted to unionize.

Via The New York Times: “A New Jersey school district on Tuesday rejected accusations by a Muslim teacher that she was fired because of her religion as ‘brazenly false’ and ‘frivolous.’ In a statement, the Hunterdon County district said Sireen Hashem was not fired from Hunterdon Central Regional High School, but simply did not have her contract renewed, for reasons ‘that were fully and clearly explained to her and her representation.’”

“Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, and Larycia Hawkins, a tenured faculty member in political science, are apparently at an impasse over her continued employment at the college,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Upgrades and Downgrades

“The HTTP 451 Error Code for Censorship Is Now an Internet Standard.”

“Telecommunications regulators in India have ordered the suspension of Facebook’s controversial program to bring free basic Internet services to mobile phone users in the country,” The New York Times reports.

Michael Feldstein looks at McGraw-Hill’s new “personalized learning authoring product.”

Yet another ed-tech accelerator: this one a partnership between Runway and the Michelson 20MM Foundation.

“National Education Week Wants to Be Edtech’s Art Basel,” Edsurge reports. (And I confess: I had to Google “Art Basel.”)

“Blackboard Continues Revitilization with New Office Space,” says Tech.co. Because nothing says innovation like an open office plan. (Bonus points for the misspelled headline too.)

Funding and Acquisitions

Technology Will Save Us (yes, that’s the real name of a company) has raised $1.8 million from Backed and a “substantial retail investor.” The company makes the BBC micro:bit.

Test prep company Gojimo has raised $1.8 million from Robin and Saul Klein, Deborah Quazzo, the London Co-Investment Fund, Firestar; Index Ventures, and Jamjar Investments. The company has raised $4 million total.

“Bloomsbury Publishing is set to acquire LexisNexis and Jordan family law publishing assets from RELX, subject to approval, for £1.4m.,” The Bookseller reports.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

According to Fusion, “Hackers breaking into baby cams are actually trying to help.”

Data and “Research”

According to the latest report from Pew Research Center, home broadband has seen a “modest decline” from 2013 to 2015.

Edsurge has published its look at the record-setting year in US ed-tech investment.

“Do In-Class Exams Make Students Study Harder?” The Atlantic asks.

Via Education Week: “Music Instruction Lacks Diversity, Study Finds.”

Also via Education Week: “Toddlers Gain Touch-Screen Skills Early, Study Finds.”

“Student Loan Subsidies Cause Almost All of the Increase in Tuition,” according to the Foundation for Economic Education.

“The (Short) Lives of Poor, Urban Teenagers” by Lisa Wade in The Pacific Standard.

Via Politico: "Four in 10 American children live in low-income families, according to a recent report from the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy.

The Trends

• The Politics of Education Technology
• Standardized Testing
• “The Employability Narrative”
• Credits and Credentialing
• The Collapse of For-Profit Higher Education (Or Not)
• Beyond the MOOC
• The Compulsion for Data
• Social Media, Campus Activism, and Free Speech
• Indie Ed-Tech
• The Business of Ed-Tech

The GitHub Repo

If you’re interested in the data that drives this year’s trends, explore the Github repo. You can also read some of the updates on this project I’ve penned throughout the year.

The Credits

The work I do on this series would not be possible without the writing and research undertaken by many people in education technology. A list of – and a deep thank you for – those whose work can be found in the links and in my thinking throughout this project and throughout the year (apologies if I've forgotten anyone):

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Justin Reich, Neil Selwyn, Mike Caulfield, Matt Reed, Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, Jessie Stommel, Sean Michael Morris, Sherman Dorn, Kin Lane, Tim Maughan, Evgeny Morozov, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, Rolin Moe, Chris Lehmann, Jose Vilson, Melinda Anderson, Melonie Fullick, Kate Bowles, David Kernohan, Michael Feldstein, Phil Hill, Martin Weller, Alan Levine, Jessica Luther, Bill Fitzgerald, Libby Nelson, Molly Hensley-Clancy, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Benjamin Herold, Carl Straumsheim, Dan Meyer, Tony Wan, Natasha Singer, Morgan Polikoff, Bryan Alexander, and of course Seymour Papert.

Education Politics

Happy New Year. From US News & World Report: “For technology companies in California, ringing in the New Year will mean adjusting to a new privacy law that limits how they can collect and use student data. The data privacy legislation was originally signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014 and goes into effect Jan. 1. It prohibits the operators of education websites, online services and apps from using any student’s personal information for targeted advertising or creating a commercial profile, as well as the selling of any student’s information.”

Via The New York Times: “How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education.”

“FCC Reaches $3 Million Settlement with New York City Department of Education in E-Rate Investigation.” “The consent decree is significant in several respects,” Comm Law Monitor reports. “First, this marks the first significant action handled by the USF ‘Strike Force’ established by Chairman Wheeler in 2014. It also marks the largest e-rate settlement to date, and includes many compliance plan requirements that could become de facto standards for future E-rate enforcement actions. Further, to the best we can determine, this is the first E-rate enforcement action the Commission has taken against a school or library applicant under the program.”

Via The New York Times: “Israel’s Ministry of Education has decided not to include a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man on the list of required reading for Hebrew high school literature classes, prompting a stormy debate over how Israeli society deals with its cultural divides.”

Education in the Courts

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Pennsylvania authorities have filed criminal charges of felony indecent assault against Bill Cosby in regard to an incident involving a former employee of Temple University. While many women have publicly accused the comedian of raping them, most of the allegations involve interactions for which statutes of limitations have expired.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

The New York Times still loves MOOCs: “The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn.”

Meanwhile on Campus

“City College of S.F. splurges on administrators’ travel, meals,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Via The New York Times: “Schools Evaluate Threats, Questioning When to Shut Down.”

Via The New York Times: “As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short.”

Via The Atlantic: “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids.”

“Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future.”

Go, School Sports Team!

“Mississippi Valley State Is Playing 14 Straight Road Games Because It Can’t Afford Not To.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time [college football] teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.”

Via The Washington Post: “Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. Here’s the evidence.”

From the HR Department

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014–15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013–14.”

Curtis B. Charles, president of Tiffin University, has quit after only six months on the job.

Upgrades and Downgrades

This story is about health startups, not ed-tech ones. But the headline on this story from The Verge is still pretty applicable to ed-tech: “ Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation.”

The pushback against Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org continues – last week in India; this week in Egypt. Via The New York Times: “A program that provided more than three million Egyptians with free access to Internet services was abruptly shut down on Wednesday, according to Facebook, the social media company that provided the program in cooperation with an Egyptian cellphone company.”

Markdown has been added to Wikity (and Mike Caulfield explains why this is important).

From the press release: “Instructure Releases Beta Version of Arc, a Complete Video Platform Solution.”

LibraryBox v2.1.

Via Phil Hill: “Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?”

Funding and Acquisitions

Terra Dotta has raised $6 million from undisclosed investors.

Careers360 has acquired Entrancecorner.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aspiring Minds has acquired LetsIntern.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn,” The Washington Post reports.

Data and “Research”

Via the Hechinger Report: “Black students are drastically underrepresented at top public colleges, data show.”

Education Politics

Arne’s officially out, and John King is now Acting Secretary of Education. (And the for-profit college sector has already reached out to him, no surprise.)

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior College, the accreditor for California’s community colleges, lost its appeal to the Department of Education and will have a year to resolve issues around its not meeting federal accreditation standards.

The FTC has fined Lumosity $2 million over deceptive advertising claims about its “brain training” program.

Education in the Courts

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The loan guarantor USA Funds plans to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court … seeking to overturn a federal appeals court ruling that barred the agency from collecting fees from a borrower who had defaulted on her student loan but started repaying it.”

The Authors Guild’s appeal of the “Google Books lawsuit” has reached the Supreme Court (although there’s no guarantee that the court will hear the case).

Also looking to have his case picked up by the Supreme Court: Taylor Bell, a high school student who claims his first amendment rights were violated when he was suspended for writing a rap song about his school’s coaches.

Also before the Supreme Court: Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which will determine the legality of mandatory union fees.

Testing, Testing…

Delaware is dropping the Smarter Balanced test in exchange for the SAT for eleventh graders.

West Virginia is considering dropping SBAC in exchange for the ACT.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs (a.k.a. Online Education)

“Towards Automated Study Guides for MOOCs: A Tech Report From the Stanford Info Lab.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Six universities from Australia, Europe, Canada and the U.S. are seeking to establish a new alliance in which each organization’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) are formally accredited by partner institutions.”

“Penn State World Campus is partnering with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) to offer union members the opportunity to finish their degrees online,” Campus Technology reports.

“Could Silicon Valley virtual charter’s all-inclusive model revolutionize the space?” asks Education Dive. Nope. It can’t.

Meanwhile on Campus

“What’s So Innovative About Salman Khan’s One-Room Schoolhouse?” asks Edsurge. NPR also profiled Khan Academy’s new “lab school.” Solid work on the PR front, Khan Academy.

“Older Students Learn for the Sake of Learning,” and The New York Times is on it.

Barber-Scotia College, a HBCU, will close for the spring semester.

@edsbs holy shit I never thought it was THIS bad pic.twitter.com/HKIIgyvMa1

— Josh (@JoshuaBBlack) January 5, 2016

Via The New York Times: “The scope of a sexual abuse scandal at St. George's School in Rhode Island widened substantially on Tuesday as lawyers reported that at least 40 former students had made credible reports of sexual abuse, and in some cases rape, by seven former staff members and four students over three decades.”

“Federal Campus Rape Investigations Near 200, And Finally Get More Funding,” the Huffington Post reports.

Colleges are banning hoverboards on campus.

Go, School Sports Team!

“ESPN’s College Football Playoff Ratings Plummet On New Year’s Eve,” NPR reports.

From the HR Department

Blackboard has replaced its CEO Jay Bhatt. The new head of the LMS company: Bill Ballhaus.

Wheaton College announced that it is taking steps to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins because of statements she made about Christians and Muslims worshiping the same god.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “More than 100 Republican state legislators have urged the University of Missouri at Columbia to fire Melissa Click, a communications professor who was videotaped during a campus protest blocking a student journalist from getting close to the protest.”

Via Edsurge: “Jim Shelton Appointed 2U President After Rob Cohen Announces Retirement.”

“A Florida Atlantic University professor who suggested in blog postings and radio interviews that the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary and other mass shootings were a hoax designed by the Obama administration to boost support for gun control was fired Tuesday,” The New York Times reports.

Via The NYT: “The principal at a Success Academy charter school who created a ‘Got to Go’ list of difficult students is taking a personal leave of absence, a Success Academy spokeswoman said on Monday.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

LEGO Education has launched a new version of its WeDo robotics kit.

Four new elements have been synthesized, completing the seventh row of the periodic table and making all non-OER chemistry textbooks out-of-date. (There’s a petition to name one of the heavy metal elements after Lemmy.)

Fortune has a special report on business interests behind the Common Core State Standards.

Forbes has published its annual clickbait “30 Under 30.” I’m unwilling to turn off my ad-blocker to read that crappy site, so if you’re like me, you’ll have to get the information about its “education changemakers” secondhand from Edsurge.

Elsewhere in clickbait, Inc has published its list of the 5000 fastest growing companies (note: just like Forbes’ clickbait, you have to apply to appear on the list), and whee, there are some education ones on it.

Khan Academy is seeking a patent on A/B testing educational videos.

Campus Technology has a list of “10 Products From CES That Will Impact the Classroom,” including a “smart helmet.” So yeah. No.

Via The New York Times: “Putting the Heat on Yik Yak After a Killing on Campus.”

“E-learning for Africa held back by power shortage,” the BBC reports.

“In 2016, The Coding Bootcamp Bubble Is Bound to Burst,” Wired predicts.

“Google is becoming U.S. K–12 schools’ operating system,” the San Jose Mercury News contends. “Google, a ‘school official?’ This regulatory quirk can leave parents in the dark,” The Washington Post frets.

Funding and Acquisitions

Tutoring company Jerry Education has raised $40 million from Sailing Capital and the investment wing of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Degreed has raised $21 million from Jump Capital, Signal Peak, Rethink Education, and Deborah Quazzo. The startup has raised $29.8 million total.

Tutoring company Zhiyou Education has raised $9.2 million from Legend Capital.

Coding bootcamp Bloc has acquired DevBridge. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Capita has acquired Brightwave Group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Washington Post has a list of donors to the Foundation for Education Excellence, the education organization founded and formerly run by Jeb Bush.

Via Buzzfeed: “Walmart Heirs Will Give $1 Billion To Expand Charter Schools.”

Data and Surveillance

The EFF offers its review of student-related privacy issues in 2015.

Via The New York Times: “Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office.”

The latest report from the Pew Research Center looks at “Parents, Teens and Digital Monitoring.”

Bill Fitzgerald looks at school directory information and how much can be gleaned from this data, despite the privacy protections that FERPA purports to provide.

Data and “Research”

Rick Hess has published his annual list purportedly ranking “edu scholars” by their influence.

A forthcoming paper: “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.”

Ambient Insights has published a white paper about 2015 ed-tech investments, which it says totaled $6.54 billion.

Inside Higher Ed covers the results of a survey by Public Agenda about what college faculty and administrators think about competency-based education.

Via Education Week: “Nation Earns a C on Quality Counts Report Card.” (It also provides a letter grade for each individual state.)

Bryan Alexander looks at a recent report by Goldman Sachs on the state of higher ed.

“Turns Out Monkey Bars And Kickball Might Be Good For The Brain,” says NPR.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Study finds that attractive female students earn higher grades than unattractive female students do. For male students, looks don’t seem to matter.”

“The concept of different ‘learning styles’ is one of the greatest neuroscience myths,” says Quartz.

If you’ve worked in education technology for any length of time, you know the story: in January 2006, Blackboard was awarded the patent (number 6988138) on the learning management system – or as described in the patent title “Internet-based education support system and methods.”

In July of that year, Blackboard publicly announced that it had received the patent, and on the same day filed suit against its competitor Desire2Learn for patent infringement.

Blackboard’s claims of invention were dubious at best, and the lawsuit prompted an angry backlash from many in the education technology community. It’s a backlash from which I don’t think Blackboard has ever fully recovered. Sure, you might argue that Blackboard is widely reviled because its software is cumbersome, unwieldy; but the patent claim and subsequent lawsuits also demonstrated that Blackboard was a bad actor in the ed-tech community, stifling innovation by making both companies and colleges fearful that experimentations in and around the LMS would prompt litigation.

In order to demonstrate that there was in fact a long history of online course software – “prior art” that could perhaps invalidate Blackboard’s patent – a group of academics, administrators, and instructional technology types, spurred on by Michael Feldstein, took to Wikipedia, “crowdsourcing” information about the learning management system. Their entry chronicles the “History of virtual learning environments” and demonstrates that the invention claimed by Blackboard had existed long before its patent filing.

In 2008, a federal jury awarded Blackboard $3.1 million in its patent infringement lawsuit against Desire2Learn. But a year later, that was reversed on appeal after Blackboard’s patent claims were invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark Office. In 2010, Blackboard announced it would end its appeals and terminate its claim on patent number 6988138.

Patent Pledges

On its website today, Blackboard now offers “The Blackboard Patent Pledge,” promising to not file infringement claims based on the five patents it lists there: “Internet Based Support System and Methods” (numbers 7493396 and 7558853), “Internet Based Education Support System and Method with Multi-Language Capability” (number 9053500), “Internet Based Education Support System, Method and Medium Providing Security Attributes in Modular, Extensible Components” (number 7908602), and “Content System and Associated Methods” (number 8745222).

Many technology companies have started to make similar pledges, agreeing not to use their patents in offensive litigation or go after open source developers. Twitter, for example, unveiled its “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” in 2012, right in the middle of the massive legal battle between Oracle and Google over IP related to the Java programming language. It was good PR for Twitter and other signees, as there’d been a growing chorus from many in the tech industry that the patent system was broken, that litigation was costly – particularly for startups – with much derision in particular aimed at “patent trolls,” those companies which buy up patents expressly to file infringement lawsuits.

To be clear, patent pledges like Twitter’s don’t challenge the underlying principles of intellectual property or the purported benefits of patent claims. (Indeed, venture capitalists often demand that companies in their investment portfolio file for patents. There’s “value” in that IP even if the startup fails to ever become profitable itself. Patents are viewed as assets.) Rather, these types of pledges are meant to demonstrate good faith in not wielding patents in lawsuits – unless, of course, as the Innovator’s Patent Agreement says, someone has filed a patent lawsuit within the past ten years.

Anyone who’s “signed” the Innovator’s Patent Agreement would be free to sue Blackboard, for example.

Prior Art

Khan Academy is one of the ed-tech companies that has agreed to the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. It currently holds several patents: “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming” (number 20150044642) and “Systems and methods for social programming” (number 20150082274), and most recently filing for one for “Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos” (number 20150310753).

A patent, to summarize US intellectual property law, can be granted to anyone who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.” A patent gives the patent-holder the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention. The invention must be new, useful, and “non-obvious.” The requirements surrounding novelty mean that a patent cannot be obtained if the invention was “patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.”

Obtaining a patent is an expensive and lengthy undertaking. Legal fees can range from $10,000 to $30,000, and it can take as many as three years from application to approval. The slow pace might be deceiving; it’s not so much that the review is thorough, it’s that there are thousands of patent claims to wade through. The US Patent and Trademark Office received over 575,000 patent applications in 2014; it approved over 325,000. The office employs 8600 patent examiners (half of whom work from home).

Those patent examiners have access to a wealth of databases – scientific, commercial, academic – in order to research patent claims. But how exhaustive is their research? As the Wikipedia entry on the “history of the virtual learning environment” highlighted, not very. There’s a cursory check for previous and similar patents; sometimes there’s a query of a commercial database or a look at non-patent literature. (For what it’s worth, the public can see what searches examiners made in reviewing a patent claim via the USPTO website.)

Indeed, the patent approval process underscores and even furthers the historical amnesia of technology (and of ed-tech). This is not an insignificant cultural force. There’s an obsession with “innovation”; there’s an assertion that new technologies are, almost by definition, inventive breakthroughs – they must be to be patented, right? There’s little incentive in turn to situate oneself in a long line of intellectual work; instead, the incentive becomes to insist – in the legal paperwork at e very least – that one is “the first.”

Khan Academy’s patents are a strange example of this. Take the “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming.” The claim includes:

A computer-implemented method for providing computer programming instructions, comprising: (a) providing, on an electronic device of a user, a tutorial comprising (i) software having one or more lines of machine-readable code, (ii) an output associated with said machine-readable code, and (iii) instructional material associated with at least a subset of said one or more lines of machine-readable code; (b) receiving one or more edits to said one or more lines of machine-readable code from said user on said electronic device; and (c) updating said one or more lines of machine-readable code and said output based on said one or more edits.

There are, of course, many other, older examples of “methods and systems for learning computer programming”: languages like Logo and Scratch as well as a plethora of online tutorials.

When Khan Academy launched its CS curriculum in 2012, one of its developers John Resig – the inventor listed on its patent claim – said he’d been inspired to utilize a dual interface by a public talk given by Bret Victor in which Victor demoed an interactive coding environment, responsive in real-time.

One might ask, did that demo constitute prior art? In this case, based on the USPTO records, I can’t see that the examiner on this patent made any searches for prior art.

Image credits: Khan Academy's patent on teaching computer programming

An Absence of a Theory of Learning

For his part, Victor responded quite critically to Khan Academy’s CS curriculum announcement, recognizing the nod that Resig had given him but looking to clarify how radically different his ideas in “Inventing on Principle” are from what the organization released in its computer programming environment. “The features are not the point,” Victor wrote.

We often think of a programming environment or language in terms of its features – this one “has code folding”, that one “has type inference”. This is like thinking about a book in terms of its words – this book has a “fortuitous”, that one has a “munificent”. What matters is not individual words, but how the words together convey a message.

Likewise, a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose.

By focusing on the features of the live-coding that Victor had demoed, Khan Academy missed the point of the talk altogether. As such, Victor in his response questioned the design principles (or lack thereof) – and by extension the learning principles (or lack thereof) – of the Khan Academy programming environment, exhorting people to read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, “the canonical work on designing programming systems for learning, and perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general.” (Amen.)

One might conclude here that Khan Academy has received a patent on “Methods and Systems for Learning Computer Programming” without recognizing the history of computer programming but even more damningly, without having much understanding of how learning works.

But like many technologists who’ve recently moved into education, Salman Khan has argued that theories of learning will no longer matter as much moving forward, thanks to the newfound power of data. In a 2012 interview with Psychology Today, Khan said,

“You have all this education theory and people try to make larger statements than maybe what their data would back up because they’ve done these small experiments that are tied to a very particular case with a very particular implementation... theory definitely matters, but I think dogma matters less. We can say, well ‘The current established theories say we should be conscientious of this but let’s just test it again.’ Maybe the results were only particular to that time. Now we can run very similar studies with much less pain and perhaps the theory won’t apply. That’s what’s exciting. Things like Khan Academy can be very powerful in this context. Theory tries to be very broad, it tries to make these laws of learning. But they’re almost always too general. And if you made it too particular it’s almost useless... Now the results will be particular to the Khan Academy implementation, but they will be impacting millions of students.”

In all fairness, Khan is hardly the only person to envision this “post-theory” version of education technology; the possibility of such a thing is something that has been widelydebatedin recent years within ed-tech and learning analytics circles. If, as some like Google’s Peter Norvig argue, there is an “unreasonable effectiveness of data” – particularly at scale – then theory will become unnecessary. The answers will surface themselves.

But without a model for thinking about teaching and learning, I’m not sure that the answers will– or that what’s surfaced will be meaningful, durable, accurate, or just.

Another Khan Academy patent – this one a filing, not yet a published claim – involves “Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos.” That is, it’s a patent for using A/B testing to determine the “effectiveness” of an educational video. Khan Academy’s patent application gives a nod to Google’s patent on “running multiple web page experiments”; indeed, A/B testing is far more prevalent in market research than in instructional design or education research.

Khan Academy has boasted in the past that it’s used A/B testing, along with messages promoting what Carol Dweck calls “growth mindset” to get students to complete more problems on its site and to return more frequently. (One might say then that Khan Academy does have a theory of learning; but I’d suggest that it’s behaviorism.)

Other ed-tech startups have also claimed to utilize A/B testing to get students to click more, something that’s always positioned as a huge breakthrough. From a 2013 article on MOOCs in the MIT Technology Review:

Through A/B testing, says [Andrew] Ng, Coursera recently found that its practice of e-mailing people to remind them of upcoming course deadlines actually made students less likely to continue with the courses. But sending e-mails summarizing students’ recent activity on the site boosted engagement by “several percentage points.” One A/B test by Udacity pitted a colorized version of a lesson against a black-and-white version. “Test results were much better for the black-and-white version,” says [Sebastian] Thrun. “That surprised me.”

It’s unclear whether the laundry lists of refinements that result from A/B testing will add up to a grand theory of learning and teaching that challenges tradition. Ng says he doesn’t think a grand theory is needed for MOOCs to succeed. “I read Piaget and Montessori, and they both seem compelling, but educators generally have no way to choose what really works,” he says. “Today, education is an anecdotal science, but I think we can turn education into a data-driven science, where you do what you know works.”

Again, one might be able to glean from A/B testing “what works,” but it’s not necessarily clear at all why something works (or doesn’t) without a theory or model of learning. Perhaps students accustomed to seeing full-color lessons in Udacity were simply surprised to see a lesson in black-and-white therefore paid more attention. (And perhaps if Udacity switched to all black-and-white lessons, the same results would be found once again when full-color slides were introduced.) A/B testing does not explain why students have specific misconceptions. Furthermore, many of these examples of using A/B testing – from Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity – mistake “engagement” for learning. A/B testing that’s focused on the former might do nothing for the latter; or worse, as MIT’s Justin Reich argued in a paper in Science, these efforts might “accelerate participation in ineffective practices.”

Regardless, all these practices – these “systems and methods” – are now going to be patented if the pressures and culture of the tech sector hold sway. By patenting these practices, these companies make a claim to history and to innovation: they’re “first!” They can stop others from developing what might be perceived as similar ideas. By relying on the patent process to validate their claims to innovation, these companies in turn serve to obscure the work of others who’ve long experimented in and around these very practices, particularly when those experiments are not yet technologized or when practitioners haven’t pursued the patent process.

Even more importantly, these patents now help to reinforce this idea of a “theory-free,” technological future of education. Or rather, patents become the theory. This version of the future does not guarantee that these companies have developed technologies that will help students learn. But it might mean that there will be proprietary assets to litigate over, to negotiate with, and to sell.

(Of course, as Blackboard recently demonstrated as it’s failing to find a new buyer for the company, even that’s no guarantee.)