Integrating Access to Content

Seamless integration of academic content and tools with a school’s learning management systems (LMS) really shouldn’t be an issue. However, institutions regularly face challenges in integrating digital learning materials with all the different campus systems.

“When solutions integrate well, the students and professors shouldn’t notice any differences between our platforms and the external content,” said Steve Kessinger, director of information services and technology at Bluefield College, Bluefield, VA. “Integrations should enhance the educational experience, not be a barrier.”

Integration should make access to digital content possible from the institution’s LMS interface and not in a new window from a new interface. Students shouldn’t have to log into the LMS a second time to access the material. Seamless integration can also make it possible for students to immediately access content as soon as they register for a class through their LMS accounts.

A well-integrated system allows students’ quiz and homework grades to go directly to the LMS gradebook for review by the instructor. It should also be easy for instructors to edit and share content with students, while administrators should be able to see analytics and student performance measurements.

To make it all happen, colleges and universities, along with instructors, need to be working with LMS providers on universal standards.

“When vendors adhere to sets of standards as opposed to proprietary approaches, it becomes far easier for institutions to adopt their solutions,” Kessinger said. “Our application development resources are extremely limited. Developing custom integrations can be very time-consuming and costly.”

Limitations to Predictive Analytics

Colleges and universities are using predictive analytics, such as grades, test scores, and attendance, as a tool to help students succeed. Austin Peay State University, Nashville, TN, was a pioneer in predictive analytics, developing a system called Degree Compass to guide students to courses they should take to satisfy degree requirements.

After initial success, the university discovered limits to what the technology could provide.

“It is simply a tool that’s available for anyone to use,” said Loretta Griffy, math professor and associate provost for student success at Austin Peay, who currently oversees the Degree Compass program. “We have a decentralized faculty advising model, which means we have 385 academic advisors. They each have their own individual styles and how they interact with students and we have a variety of advising tools that they can use. This is just one of them.”

In 2013, Degree Compass was acquired by the software firm Desire2Learn, which stopped allowing students to see grade projections to avoid discouragement. The firm also found that institutions weren’t enamored with the student-directed degree-planning tool and that it was a challenge to integrate Degree Compass with a school’s course catalog and the student information system.

“Sometimes we really hit the mark and nail it early, and get it to the point where something is cultured in our organization by the time the market is ready for it,” said Kenneth Chapman, vice president of market research and strategy at D2L. “I wouldn’t call Degree Compass one of the applications that we saw as hitting the mark.”

Degree Compass is something of a Catch-22, according to Griffy. The algorithms the tool uses need a student’s prior grade history to accurately recommend courses and majors, but students can’t gain much from the information until they have attended classes for a semester or two. By that time, they may have already decided their academic path. Besides, paper degree-planning charts can be just as useful.

“But it’s not fancy,” Griffy said. “You print it and walk around with it. It’s very simple.”

Video's Impact on Higher Ed

Video technology is being used in 99% of higher-ed classrooms, which is leading to an increase in student achievement and engagement, according to a new survey of more than 1,000 educators, administrators, students, IT and media staff, and instructional designers.

The State of Video in Education 2017 found that 99% of institutions reported their instructors regularly incorporated video into their curriculum. More than 70% of the responding institutions said they used video technologies for remote learning and teaching.

The report also noted that 93% of respondents said they believed video increased student satisfaction and 85% reported an increase in student achievement. Another 70% said video increases a sense of affiliation with alumni and 78% added it makes onboarding new employees smoother.

Nearly half of the respondents said a video solution was integrated into their school’s learning management system and 15% use video tools built into the LMS. Ten percent said they had no video solution inside the LMS but that the institution was considering it.

Tool Brings Gaming into the Classroom

“Gameful” instruction allows students to choose assignments they think are challenging and uses software to guide them through those choices. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently launched a tool to make that learning approach available in the classroom.

GradeCraft employs competitive leaderboards, badges, and links to unlock information to help students work their way through the coursework. The web application also allows instructors to create course shells in the learning management system (LMS) where students are encouraged to try new things, as well as receive analytics about their progress.

“Everyone starts at zero and then they build toward mastery of the course material,” Barry Fishman, a U-M professor who helped developed the tool, said in a university release. “We get questions about how rigorous a course is given how many students earn high grades, but we consistently hear instructors describe their students doing creative and high-quality work. When you design these environments properly, you can create an incredible learning experience for students.”

The tool, developed in 2012, was made available to all U-M faculty through its LMS earlier this year. Some parts of the gameful learning software are now being used in 58 courses, serving more than 10,000 U-M students. A site license has also been purchased by the University of Arizona.

“We believe gameful is a great way to reconnect students to learning and we’re excited to bring it to a larger audience,” Fishman said.

Consolidation Roiling Ed Tech

The ed-tech market is experiencing a lot of churn right now, as charted by the 2017 Higher Education Technology Landscape Report by higher-ed advisory service Eduventures, which tracks the activity of more than 500 vendors across 40 market segments. This year’s report drew on about 100 fewer vendors thanks to consolidation and closings.

Eduventures, which is owned by the National Research Center for College & University Admissions, tallied the most mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations among textbook, digital course material, and courseware companies; online course providers; learning management systems; learning analytics platforms; and constituent relationship management platforms. For online course providers and online program managers, the report saw “almost as many vendor options as there are academic programs or pedagogical models from which to choose.”

It also noted that cloud-based solutions are now nearly ubiquitous in higher ed for learning management systems, email, and educational apps, while adoption of cloud-based student information systems (SIS) is trending upward “as many institutions start moving critical operations and business processes to cloud providers.”

Adaptive learning and online program managers are witnessing “disproportionately high” growth, according to the report, while courseware and learning-analytics platforms undergo a wave of consolidation.

The segments showing rising competition include student-success and     -retention solutions, e-portfolios, social media platforms, online program managers, and business intelligence and analytics platforms.

MOOCs Can Rely Too Much on Social Media

A recent Australian study found concerns about integrating too much social media into massive open online courses (MOOCs). Carpe Diem, a MOOC offered in 2014, used Facebook and Twitter for online communication and collaboration, but about half of the course participants didn’t use either.

According to the study,  41% refused to use social media because they felt it blurred the line between their social and professional identities. Nearly 50% were also unhappy with the learning management system (LMS) used by the course.

Respondents complained that the social media sites were intimidating to use and created confusion. Some said it took too much time to check into the LMS, Facebook, and Twitter, while others thought it would have worked better if social media worked within the LMS.

Facilitated discussions, work sharing with peers, and networking opportunities were the most-cited benefits of using social media platforms within MOOCs. However, the group that wasn’t as thrilled saw Facebook and Twitter as useless.

“It may be useful to outline in detail to students the contributions that social learning can bring to a MOOC and, indeed, to any online learning environment,” the researchers wrote. “Those who believe that conversations on social media are a waste of time may view things differently if they understand how conversations and knowledge sharing with their peers can support their learning experience.”

Future LMS Encompasses Multiple Apps

The learning management system (LMS) of the future—possibly the near future—will enable colleges and universities to connect a variety of educational and administrative applications together as needed, much like a set of building blocks. At least that’s the scenario the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) is working toward.

In a report in Campus Technology, ELI Executive Director Malcolm Brown said his team originally assumed the LMS would still work as a single application, although with greater functionality. They came to realize that institutions needed to be able to tailor their LMS to accommodate the wide array of course activities and the needs of a diverse student body.

“Again, that takes you away from the idea of a single application being able to fit the bill for all comers,” Brown said. “We decided an ‘uber application’ is not going to work.”

One possibility is that the LMS could provide the main interface for students, who would access other applications through it. Or, students could log directly into applications, with the LMS serving as a connection.

The biggest challenge, Brown noted, will be working out open standards to allow systems to plug in multiple applications.

Chatbots in the Classroom

Chatbots are being used in retail and finance to provide answers to common customer-service issues on e-commerce sites. Instructors at the BI Norwegian Business School are working on ways to use the same technology in the classroom.

Not satisfied with the choices in learning management systems, advisor Erik Bøylestad Nilsen and his team worked with the educational technology startup Edtech Foundry to pilot Differ, a solution that uses chatbots to encourage students to interact with course materials. Differ is able to respond to frequently asked questions and urges students to participate in class discussions and forums.

“Students have a lot of the same questions over and over again,” Nilsen said in an article for EdSurge. “They’re looking for the answers to easy administrative questions and they have similar types of questions regarding their subjects each year. Chatbots help get rid of some of the noise. Students are able to get answers as quick as possible and move on.”

Chatbots use data from the courses to learn the answers and spot student behaviors. They can also be used to send direct messages to individual students rather than posting information to the entire class. Students using the tool appear to be more open to talking to chatbots than originally envisioned.

“They’re afraid of being judged,” Nilsen said. “There’s no space where they can ask the silly questions, where they can stay out of the faculty’s loop.”

Checking Grades Predicts Student Success

How often students check their grades online is the best way to predict how well they will do in a class, according to a report from Blackboard. The educational technology firm found that students who accessed its gradebook function were the most successful in a class, while those who never accessed their grades were more likely to fail.

“This surprised me, given that other tools (like assessments) directly and tangibly influence a student’s grade,” John Whitmer, director of analytics and research at Blackboard, wrote in a blog post about the study. “This is an independent behavioral measure and yet is a very strong predictor.”

The data came from spring 2016 courses that were filtered by size of class, average course time, and use of the online gradebook. The filtered results provided information on more than 600,000 students.

The research found that students spent most of their time on the learning management system to look at content. Surprisingly, those who spent more than the average amount of time on course content earned lower grades.

“Students who have mastered course materials can quickly answer questions; those who ponder over questions are more likely to be students who are struggling with the material,” Whitmer wrote. “The relationship is stronger in assessment than assignments because assessments measure all time spent in the assessment, whereas assignments don’t measure the offline time spent creating the material. Regardless, this trend of average time spent as the most frequent behavior of successful students is consistent across both tools, and is a markedly different relationship than is found in other tools.”

App Keeps Students Organized

An app is now being offered in the United States that provides college students one-stop access to all of their educational content and resources. The digital academic organizer Myday collects information from across a university and makes it available to all student devices.

The app, developed by the U.K.-tech firm Collabco, gathers content from an institution’s learning- and student-management systems and even provides students with information on bus routes, social media updates, and homework assignments. The app uses a single login and can be customized by each student.

In addition, the mobile app can be branded for each university that uses it, has multiple-language support, and can be integrated with other tools such as Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, and Office 365. Collabco also provides a support team to guide colleges through the setup procedure.

“Colleges and universities are always looking for new ways to attract and retain students in an increasingly digital world,” Collabco CEO Mark Francis said in a report for Campus Technology. “The key to this is to make education a highly personalized, engaging experience for each individual.”

Video Playing Bigger Role in Higher Ed

A new study found that the use of video may have reached a tipping point in higher education. The third annual State of Video in Education report noted that 75% of all students now use video in their assignments and the share of institutions using flipped classrooms has increased to 58%.

More than half of administrators, instructors, and students reported that their institution now uses a video solution integrated into its learning management system (LMS). In addition, video feedback on assignments has grown from 26% in the 2015 survey to 32% this year.

The survey also found that 93% of the respondents said they believe video has a positive impact on student satisfaction and 85% said having video as part of their resource toolkit increases teacher satisfaction. Nearly 90% agreed that it boosts student achievement levels, while 76% said they believe it increases student retention rates.

“For the first time, over 50% of higher-education respondents report that their institution has now integrated a video solution into the LMS,” said Ron Yekutiel, chairman and CEO of Kaltura, the video technology provider that conducted the survey. “If proof were needed that video is now mainstream in education, then this is it. Those institutions that do not yet have a comprehensive video strategy in place for the new academic year risk being left behind.”

LMS Engagement Predicts Retention Rates

Colleges and universities often rely on metrics such as grade-point averages (GPA) and academic standing to predict student success. Logging onto the institution’s learning management system (LMS) may be a more accurate indicator.

Data gathered by the education tech firm Civitas Learning suggested the number of times students log into the LMS is one of the best ways to determine if they will stay with the class or drop out, according to a report for Inside Higher Education. Civitas Learning, co-founded by Mark Milliron, a keynote speaker at the 2016 Textbook Affordability Conference, uses predictive analytics to provide colleges and universities with insights into ways to help students succeed.

The for-profit Strayer University uses Civitas data to review its LMS engagement numbers from the beginning of the semester and has experimented with faculty members reaching out directly to those students who don’t log on often. The intervention resulted in a 5% increase in class attendance and an 8% decrease in course dropout rate.

“It’s a key early signal that they can use with students,” Laura Malcolm, vice president of product management at Civitas, said of the data gathered by the firm. “The more you focus on behavior, the more predictive it becomes.”

Technology Alone Is Not Enough

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, celebrated the birth of their daughter by announcing they would invest nearly their entire fortune in good causes, with personalized learning topping the list. While certainly a magnanimous gesture, there is one small problem: There’s little evidence that technology by itself can replace good schools.

Studies have shown that creating personalized learning tools that allow students to learn at their own pace, provide constant feedback, and recommend lessons based on previous work can produce improvement in learning results. But students still need support from teachers and parents.

Jason Reich, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported in a paper published in Science that 38% of students enrolled in online courses from Harvard and MIT live in more affluent neighborhoods. Reich also found students with college-educated parents were nearly twice as likely to finish the online courses they take.

“The history of education technology shows emerging technologies tend to disproportionately benefit affluent people,” Reich said in a National Public Radio report. “Designing for digital equity is really hard.”

The good news is Zuckerberg has shown a willingness to do the hard work necessary. Facebook engineers are already working on a personalized learning platform with Summit Schools, a chain of technology-centered charter schools. In addition, Zuckerberg has invested in AltSchool, a Bay Area startup that blends Montessori educational concepts with high-tech tools. He also plans to build free-standing private schools for low-income students.

“The technology is important, but it’s not really the hard or the expensive part,” said Michael Feldstein, co-founder of the education blog e-Literate, in the NPR report. “These challenges are particularly hard for poorer schools where there is less money and less support for teachers.”

New Tech Tool for Teachers

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an online tool that let instructors show their students ways to solve problems, highlight important text and explain the concept, and provide personal feedback? The tool would have to be easy to use and allow students access anywhere and on any device.

That tool may soon be just a download away. Snip is a Microsoft Garage project still in the preview stage, but early results have shown it to be user-friendly for most teachers and their students.

“The simplicity of the tool is one of its major attractions,” Peter West, director of eLearning, Saint Stephen’s College, Queensland, Australia, wrote for eSchool News. “The functions provided make it easy for even a technology-wary teacher to understand and use effectively, and its capabilities are enough for a large percentage of teaching scenarios.”

Once downloaded, Snip allows teachers to explain selected items on a web page, document, worksheet, or any format displayed on a computer screen. The tool provides pens of various colors for teachers to use to explain concepts on the screen, which can then be saved as a video file or screenshot. There is an erase feature in case the teacher makes a mistake, and the entire procedure can be finished in less than 60 seconds, according to West.

“It also provides another valuable tool for teachers to transition to blended and flipped learning,” he wrote. “It is a wonderful example of a simple technology dramatically enhancing learning.”

EdX, DOJ Reach Accessibility Agreement

A compliance review by the U.S. Department of Justice has led to an agreement with edX to make its massive open online courses (MOOCs) more accessible to people with disabilities. EdX agreed to make its website, mobile applications, and learning management system fully accessible within the next 18 months.

As part of the settlement, edX will provide guidance for course creators on best practices in creating accessible online courses, hire a web-accessibility coordinator, and develop a web-accessibility policy. The settlement acknowledges that edX has taken steps to improve access, but needs to do more.

“We were very aware in 2012 or so about the emergence of MOOCs and the importance, or the potential importance, that they offer to students who have distance barriers and cost barriers to getting good educational content,” Eve L. Hill, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “And they offer a potentially really good avenue for students with disabilities.”

Details of what was wrong with the edX platform were not provided, but Hill told The Chronicle that common website accessibility problems include videos without captions and pop-up windows that can’t recognize screen-reader applications used by the visually impaired. 

Unizin Enables Cross-Platform Content

Unizin is a consortium of colleges and universities that’s making news. The group, which endeavors to provide a standards-based infrastructure for digital education, will work with Blackboard and Instructure to connect digital learning platforms.

Students and faculty from Unizin institutions work with content from multiple platforms, according to a report in University Business. Content storing, sharing, and discovery services offered by both Blackboard and Instructure platforms will be connected through the Unizin Content Relay.

“Students and faculty need access to open tools that allow them to work collaboratively, across institutions, to create the best learning programs,” said Mark Strassman, senior vice president of product management for Blackboard.

Using the Content Relay will facilitate instructors in finding content from both platforms. It will also be easier for faculty to revise and mix the content which can be used across a variety of formats, including residential, flipped classroom, online courses, badged experiences, and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Unizin has also added Oregon State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Minnesota to its list of member institutions. Colorado State University, Indiana University, the University of Florida, and the University of Michigan are the founding partners of Unizin.

LMS Useful, But Not Very Usable

The average learning management system (LMS) has been in place for eight years and about 15% of institutions are looking to replace theirs in the foreseeable future, according to a new study by the Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR). Most schools want systems providing improved functionality.

However, the study determined that faculty and students don’t use all the available features in their current LMS, creating something of a conundrum in deciding what a higher-level system should constitute. Being able to post content (for faculty) and access content (for students) in the system generated the highest satisfaction for more than 75% of both groups. When it came to advanced system tools, though, satisfaction ratings took a plunge.

Both instructors and students told ECAR researchers they don’t know how to utilize LMS features beyond the basics. Most received sketchy training on their system and were left to explore the LMS on their own. Despite that, both groups still believe the LMS helps teaching and learning and they’d like to take greater advantage of its capabilities.

“To meet users’ needs and expectations, the next-generation LMS should be mobile friendly, personalized, customizable, adaptive, intuitive, integrated, and designed to enhance student learning. These systems will function as digital learning environments for students, administrative systems for faculty to manage their courses, and interoperable systems that institutions can integrate into their administrative IT portfolio to leverage analytic applications,” the report concluded.

Students showed enthusiasm for LMS features that would enable them to interact and communicate with each other more easily, such as instant messaging, video chat, online tutoring, and social group discussions and forums. Faculty were more interested in tools to help manage classroom tasks more efficiently and to recommend new or different academic resources.

The study, The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives, is part of a larger Educause initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to explore the next iteration of digital learning and identify where efforts should be focused.

Newer Faculty Like Digital Better

College students and tenured faculty agree: When all else is equal, they'd rather use print textbooks. But newly minted faculty may be predisposed toward digital course materials.

Guy Adams, who's in charge of academic publishing and outreach for the UCLA Store at the University of California Los Angeles, has noticed that the newer faculty on his campus are the ones most comfortable with online materials. Adams was part of a panel presentation addressing Best Practices in Course Materials on March 7 at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX.

He said the new faculty became accustomed to using online resources while preparing their dissertations and doing other work for their doctorate studies. That comfort level is now carrying over into their teaching and they're more apt than older faculty to choose digital materials for their courses, often materials accessed through the school's learning management system (LMS).

"They're very facile with using this and teaching with this," Adams told the audience. "The bookstore is not involved with this process at all." For that reason, he advised campus bookstores to learn as much as possible about their institution's LMS and look for opportunities to get involved.

Lynn Turns to iTunes U

Many colleges and universities offer online content through iTunes U, but use other providers for their learning management system (LMS) because the Apple software doesn’t provide features such as analytics, attendance tracking, and gradebooks. Lynn University, Boca Raton, FL, is going the other direction, phasing out Blackboard Learn in favor of iTunes U.

Lynn is already a committed Apple campus, piloting a program that replaced textbooks with iPad minis in January 2013. That program was expanded last fall to include all freshmen, transfer students, and upperclassmen enrolled in core classes. The university plans to issue minis to more than 2,000 students next fall.

The move to iTunes U makes sense for Lynn because its pilot program showed that students using the iPad earned better grades than those who didn’t use the device. In addition, the study found that three-quarters of the students preferred using the iBook created for the course over a traditional textbook.

“Since we are moving forward with content and making sure that a device is available for every kid, we wanted to make sure they had a mobile environment,” said Chris Boniforti, chief information officer at Lynn.

Lynn will probably use iTunes to host content and assignments and will have to develop its own system to track those analytical features not offered through iTunes, according to the report in Inside Higher Ed. But the move does provide Lynn students with a mobile-first LMS that doesn’t require them to switch between systems to use.

A survey of Lynn students enrolled in core courses in fall 2013 found that 94% felt the tablet contributed to their learning experience and 90% still used the device in classes that didn’t require it. Sixty-one percent of the students added that getting an iPad mini helped them decide to attend Lynn.

All Lynn courses will use iTunes U to host content and assignments by this fall, but only about a third will feature free iBooks created by Lynn faculty members. The rest will use traditional textbooks. Moving a course to the iTunes U system only requires knowing where to upload content and which boxes to use for text for those faculty members unwilling to create their own iBooks.

“The next thing for me is to make sure that this is better than the way we’ve been doing it,” said Michael P. Petroski, who manages faculty development for the tablet initiative. “That sort of keeps me up at night: to make sure it’s not a cool gimmick.”

Academic Libraries Seek LMS Integration

Campus libraries are still popular places where students can go to study and work on papers while mixing in a little socializing. One thing most of those students won’t do during a trip to the library is open a library book. They’ll do that later—online.

As Campus Technology notes, academic libraries are experiencing a shift in how they provide materials to students for research and course readings. More students (and also faculty) are accessing the library’s collection through e-reserves.

Students may not be all that crazy about studying from a digital textbook, but they do find it much more convenient to go online from the comfort of their own laptops to tap into the library’s materials to gather information for a project or to read something their professor has placed on reserve for the class. For research, in particular, print books are too cumbersome.

From the perspective of librarians, though, there is one major hurdle: learning management systems. Far from being dismayed at the move from print to digital usage, campus libraries are eager to accommodate students online. They’d like to be able to integrate their e-reserves with the school’s LMS to create a one-stop-shopping location, so to speak, for student reading materials. At the very least, libraries want their catalog to be incorporated in the LMS search function to show students and faculty what’s available through the library.

However, library systems and learning management systems are not always fully compatible. Some schools required extensive customization to get both systems to work together, while others created an LMS from scratch in order to build in access to the library. Still others opted to develop library guides that could be placed within the LMS.