Blog Readings – PhilOnEdTech

Despite the fact that private equity firms usually lay off lots of people, Thoma Bravo, the new expected owner, has promised that it won’t reduce Instructure’s staff on the new path to profitability.

That plan was never realistic and likely misstated by company management. Today, Instructure has implemented a new, even larger round of layoffs, this time primarily targeted at the Canvas side of the business (academic markets in higher ed and K-12). More than 150 people are losing their jobs, representing more than 12% of the workforce. These layoffs appear to be broad-based, hitting most if not all departments. When combined with the January cuts, Instructure has now removed almost 20% of its full-time staff since the beginning of the year. These are significant layoffs.

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Kevin Kelly: “It’s been a month since I suggested COVID-19 recovery and planning must include student perspectives. Three weeks ago I subsequently analyzed results from Top Hat’s COVID-19 Student Survey About Online Learning. Over the last week I found several more higher ed surveys that sought to get a better picture of the student experience this spring. In this post, I’ll try to make sense of what students are saying, what students are recommending teachers and institutions do to support them moving forward, and what the surveys may not be asking.”

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I would assume that over the next week or two, we’re going to start seeing a lot more news out of higher education on how schools are choosing to plan for the fall. And hopefully they’ll be more definitive than what we’ve seen in many cases so far.And that is already happening.There is enormous pressure on schools to make their fall plans public soon, and there is enormous pressure for them to include some form of face-to-face experience. Despite this pressure, however, what we won’t see is “The Unlikeliest Scenario: Fully face-to-face programs in Fall 2020.” Think fully online, think hybrid.

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Despite the false dichotomy often presented in news reports and opinion articles of online vs. face-to-face, or online OR face-to-face, what we are often seeing in reality with Fall 2020 planning is a variety of methods to combine face-to-face and virtual models into a hybrid offering for Fall 2020. This hybridization of higher ed will likely continue beyond the fall term, accelerating a trend that already existed before the pandemic. This trend is more significant in impact that the introduction of fully-online programs or universities.

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To me this story is quite interesting, despite the lack of coverage beyond press releases and small blurbs. We have a school known for online graduate programs applying that model to undergraduate programs with short notice, and we have an expanded OPM partnership into undergraduate levels (outside of the sweet spot of masters programs). One of the pre-COVID questions around the OPM market was whether schools benefit from these partnerships in terms of building up their own capabilities for online education, and with COVID we add the question of how quickly schools can expand quality online programs that go beyond the over-reliance on Zoom for remote teaching. In the terms of our graphic, how quickly can schools transition to Phases 3 and 4.

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Kevin Kelly: “While I see the hybrid flexible approach – HyFlex for short – to be just one possibility among several, it really does offer a clear opportunity to begin working on fall courses now, without waiting for institutions to decide a) if campuses will be open to students in fall 2020, b) how many students might be allowed to return to campus, c) how they would respond to a mid-term resurgence of COVID-19 cases, and so on. In organizational change scenarios, ambiguity is one of the biggest challenges for any community and one of the biggest potential impediments to progress and success. Being able to choose a path during a time of uncertainty provides more time for course planning, professional development, preparation for student support, and even technology adoption, as appropriate.”

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Thanks to our dangerous path down the Unified Design for Learning (UDL) concept, we are launching a new podcast program today: POET Readings, where we read the PhilOnEdTech blog posts. We have all posts available through podcasts, starting with April 3 (Two out of five US college presidents already considering online options for Fall 2020 term). We all read our own posts, including guest author Stephanie Moore’s (Planning for Resilience, not Resistance). We’re deep into negotiations with Evie Cummings to replace my reading of Higher Ed Should Rise to the Challenge of Offering Greater Student-centered Flexibility. How do we deliver M&Ms to Florida with the brown ones removed, without melting? (Update: negotiations successful, new audio uploaded)

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In a long-rumored move, McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage Learning have called off their planned merger. Officially, the reason is that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had required more divestitures of titles than either party had assumed going into the “merger of equals.”

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Kevin Kelly: “In my most recent blog post, I stated that too few institutions are talking to students as they make plans for the fall and beyond. Little did I know that Top Hat was conducting a nationwide survey that got over 3,000 students to respond. Here’s a quote from Nick Stein, Top Hat’s Chief Marketing Officer, describing why they engaged students with a survey:”

We have been closely following the impact of the abrupt and unplanned shift to remote learning this Winter, both in MindWires and directly through conversations with our customers. We were inspired to do the survey to hear directly from students about how they’ve been affected and how they’re feeling about remote learning — and whether the technology available to them today was providing an engaging and effective learning experience. We hope that by sharing our findings, we can all better understand how COVID-19 is impacting technology adoption, usage, and effectiveness in higher ed.

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Recently, Inside Higher Education published an op-ed article on “How to Responsibly Reopen Colleges in the Fall.” In this article the authors have noble intentions yet base their arguments on gross misunderstandings of the modalities on online and face-to-face and blended education. In the first three paragraphs they set up a misinformed strawman based on a false dichotomy.Because decision makers are likely to turn to articles like this as a guide for their planning, the many faults and factual inaccuracies in that op-ed require a response so we can better inform responsible decision making. Without any support for the claims made, what the IHE article really does is engage in confirmation bias that has unfortunate potential to unnecessarily constrain strategic planning and resilient system architecture that’s necessary for weathering the crisis.

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