Our Relevant History With The Gates Foundation

“ MindWires used to be a grantee of the Gates Foundation from 2013 – 2018.”

I think this fact, and why the relationship began, ended, and what purpose it served, would be a great candidate for the next article in your Gates Foundation series.

Since starting his foundation in 2000, Gates has donated about $30 billion to organizations focusing largely on global health and development. The Gates Foundation has spent more than half a billion on educational causes, which provides some context for the comparatively modest $10 million that he has personally invested in the Big History Project. Nevertheless, Gates has insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data — students and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from classes, all of which allows his team to track what’s working and what isn’t as the course grows. “Our priority,” he told me from across the table, “was to get it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it.”

I’ve certainly learned when I make a mistake, you know, my thinking is sloppy, I like to be very hard on myself like “that is so stupid, how could you not see how those pieces fit together?” And that way that you’re, you know, very disciplined yourself and careful about you’re thinking, you don’t want it to extend out to what other people may not get something quite as quickly.” It’s like, you know, “how come you don’t don’t get this thing?”

That is why Phil and I are delighted and excited to announce a new initiative we’re calling e-Literate TV, in collaboration with a company called In the Telling. Using some of the lessons that we’re learning from the MOOC community about differential engagement, our goal is create multiple entry points into a conversation about the issues. The first entry point is a series of 10-minute video episodes providing overviews of each new topic. One of the two great assets that In the Telling brings to the table is their experience at telling stories in film. With their help, we are crafting segments that we hope will be appealing and informative to those faculty, presidents, provosts, and other important college and university stakeholders who are not ed tech junkies. It will introduce the topics in what we hope will be an engaging and provocative manner. All episodes will be released under a Creative Commons license on YouTube.

For those who wish to dive deeper, we will be taking advantage of In the Telling’s second asset, which is their Telling Story platform. We can tie content directly to the timeline of each video, bringing up further references, like e-Literate blog posts or relevant scholarly articles, in context. And finally, we’ll be integrating that platform into WordPress, where we will be posing questions that are intended to be discussion starters across campus stakeholder groups. We are particularly interested in community- and conversation-building features and how to add to these capabilities over time. Access to that content will also be free, and in cases where it is e-Literate blog posts, it is already Creative Commons licensed.

As we have discussed both here and elsewhere, we think the term “personalized learning” carries a lot of baggage with it that needs to be unpacked, as does the related concept of “adaptive learning.” The field in general is grappling with these broad concepts and approaches; an exploration of specific examples and implementations should sharpen our collective understandings about the promise and risks of these concepts and approaches. The Gates foundation has funded the development of an ETV series and given us a free editorial hand to explore the topics of personalization and adaptive learning.

The heart of the series will be a series of case studies at a wide range of different schools. Some of these schools will be Gates Foundation grantees, piloting and studying the use of “personalized learning” technology or product, while others will not. (For more info about some of the pilots that Gates is funding in adaptive learning, including which schools are participating and the evaluation process the foundation has set up to ensure an object review of the results, see Phil’s post about the ALMAP program.) Each ETV case study will start by looking at who the students are at a particular school, what they’re trying to accomplish for themselves, and what they need. In other words who are the “persons” for whom we are trying to “personalize” learning? Hearing from the students directly through video interviews will be a central part of this series. We then take a look at how each school is using technology to support the needs of those particular students. We’re not trying to take a pro- or anti- position on any of these approaches. Rather, we’re trying to understand what personalization means to the people in these different contexts and how they are using tools to help them grapple with it.

If we choose to think of personalized learning as a practice rather than a product, we can start by taking a hard look at course designs and identifying those areas that fail to make meaningful individual contact with students. These gaps will be different from course to course, subject to subject, student population to student population, and teacher to teacher. Although there is no generic answer to the question of where students are most likely to fall through the cracks in a course, there are some patterns to look for (as we will discuss later in this article).

Technology then becomes an enabler for increasing meaningful personal contact.

As for the topic of courtesy heads up, this is a tricky area for us. We are not in the habit of giving advance notice on posts unless we need to get a reaction or comment from a subject of analysis. In this case, however, the report has been released in quite a public manner, and I did not feel the need to get commentary or quotes from any of the parties involved. This being the case, we at e-Literate have to be careful not to give preferential treatment to clients or funding partners as that could potentially harm the integrity of our independent analysis. In other words, we feel the need to go out of our way to not give courtesy notice or different treatment of organizations because of our relationship. We do need to disclose relationships to help readers choose how to interpret our starting positions.

The Foundation has a long track record of investing in educational technology – particularly courseware. What differentiates this new phase of activity?

Five key factors distinguish our new work on courseware from previous initiatives:

1. Active engagement of focus populations in courseware design and development. Partners will develop courseware in design sprints that incorporate the voice of the students and faculty to ensure that the final courseware products center their needs and lived experiences. Our current initiative aims to be more intentional in prioritizing meeting the needs of diverse students and instructors (including adjuncts). We are also investing in user research that not only focuses on real-time student and faculty experiences, specifically the experiences and needs of Black, Latino, Indigenous students, and students from low-income backgrounds

2. Robust efficacy research to understand courseware impact on student outcomes. Specifically, our research partners will focus on measuring the specific and disaggregated impact and efficacy of the use of this courseware by our focus populations.

3. Focus on complementing evidence-based teaching and instructional practices. Having “best in class” courseware alone will not improve student outcomes unless it is combined with evidence-based teaching and instructional practices. Thus, we also focus on implementation and professional development support for faculty to best implement the courseware and support their teaching practices.

4. Exemplars to influence the market. Strong partnerships with educators, equity experts, researchers, educational technology providers, publishers, and students from historically underserved communities will produce novel approaches, practices, tools, and blended learning methods for institutions shifting to learner-centered educational models. Corresponding research and implementation partnerships to pilot/test and refine the courseware will help continuous improvement efforts.

5. Catalyzing strategic institutional change and sustainability. Bringing together mission-aligned providers with institutional partners prioritizing equity to ensure learning success and eliminate disparities in outcomes for Black, Latino, Indigenous students, and students from low-income backgrounds.