Archives for March 2019

In this e-Literate post written in November 2018, I started to articulate how the Empirical Educator Project could produce a methodology of change. The basic idea is that, as with other knowledge work such as software engineering or industrial design, educational institutions have put processes in place to ensure that academics provide quality education in a time-bounded way. But it’s the wrong kind of process. It hobbles the creativity of the knowledge workers while failing to tame the uncertainty it was meant to tame.

Software engineering invented agile methodologies and industrial design invented design thinking to address this problem. These approaches have some characteristics in common. I propose that empirical education could give rise to an analogous methodology for excellence in higher education.

Read the post.

Our first public EEP collaboration was between James Madison University, which has world-class institutional and academic psychometric programs, and Carnegie Mellon University, which has world-class learning engineering programs. One excels at measuring learning impact and the other at designing for learning impact. Also, the two universities happen to be driving distance away from each other.

The faculty began monthly exchanges, visiting each other’s campuses and learning from each other. Since this article was written, the collaboration has continued and matured. Look for an update soon.

Read JMU’s article.

Read my write-up at e-Literate.

Using video interviews from the 2018 Empirical Educator summit, I reflect three months afterward on the lessons learned and the progress that was beginning to coalesce. It’s easy to get smart people together and have a satisfying conversation. Much harder is making something happen afterward.

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Drawing inspiration from the wisdom of our 2018 Empirical Educator summit attendees, I wrote a short post on e-Literate about the need for a clearer sector-wide mission statement that can help us to identify and tackle the big challenges together.

Read the post.

After the first day of our first summit—at Stanford University in late February of 2018, we asked our diverse cohort of attendees a few questions about empirical education, starting with what they thought an empirical educator is. Keep in mind that many of the attendees were meeting for the first time and had relatively little idea of what we were trying to accomplish coming in.

We were startled by how much progress we made on finding common ground in just one day. The results are shown in the video footage on the home page of this web site.

Inspired by their answers, I wrote my own post expanding on my idea of what an empirical educator is. Specifically I wrote about four levels of empirical education: (1) intuitive, (2) mindful, (3) meta-cognitive, and (4) social.

Read the post.