THE GRAND EXPERIMENT: InsideHigherEd's Steve Kolowich takes a long, long look at the Knewton-Pearson-Arizona State University love triangle, the legal maneuverings that allow companies to be classified as "school officials" to get around FERPA, and the not-so-successful stories in some of Knewton's flipped classrooms. Writes Kolowich after visiting a troubled student: "You can lead a student to an adaptive learning platform, but you cannot make him learn." The piece also offers an interesting look into why Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira "thinks about 'Gattaca' all the time" in his approach to data, and the one problem that still bugs this otherwise confident man: the possible repercussions if students themselves decided to share the billion of data points that Knewton collected to employers and graduate admissions officers.
