"Go ahead, experiment with some of these systems," Candace Thille advises professors and university leaders. "Just don’t get locked in for a long-term contract and develop your whole approach around a particular system, because it’s going to change, or it should change."
Candace M. Thille helped kick-start the move to bring big data to college teaching.
She has founded the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, won millions of dollars in grants, and been a fixture on the lecture circuit about the power of so-called adaptive learning, where data-powered algorithms serve up content keyed to what a student is ready to learn next. Publishers, venture-capital investors, and foundations have followed her lead. They’ve poured hundreds of millions into new companies and new products vying to score big contracts with colleges, sometimes promising to be the "robot tutor" for struggling students.
It seems like a classic business success story.
These days, though, Ms. Thille has begun to have darker thoughts about an industry she helped spark.
She still believes that adaptive learning will become an increasingly important tool in teaching. But she fears that rapid commercialization is exactly the wrong way to foster innovation at this early stage. What’s more, she thinks professors and higher-education leaders are making a dangerous mistake by letting companies take the lead in shaping the learning-analytics market.
Ms. Thille, who moved to Stanford University's Graduate School of Education in the fall of 2013, has only recently begun to go public with that critique, voicing it to a few small audiences. But as she shared during extensive interviews with The Chronicle over the past few weeks, it’s a message she hopes college leaders and professors will heed, if only because she’s a messenger who understands, despite all the hype, both how "crude" and simplistic many of the products are today, and how educationally valuable they could one day become.
Her concerns boil down to these:
Read the entire story at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website. (Access may require a subscription.)
