As Phil noted in his post, Blackboard has hired a new CEO, a guy by the name of Bill Ballhaus. We don’t know much about him yet, other than that he came from outside education. (That shouldn’t be considered a disqualifier, by the way. Instructure CEO Josh Coates also came from outside education, for example, […]
McGraw Hill’s New Personalized Learning Authoring Product
In what has to be the softest launch ever, McGraw Hill has been quietly talking about their new personalized learning authoring system. If you ask them when it will be available to all customers, they will tell you “right now.” But since it doesn’t even have a name yet, I’m not sure how customers would […]
Personalized Learning and the Teacher
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Rees wrote a post calling out that, no matter what potential of so-called “personalized learning” for improving student outcomes, there is a potential—and a temptation—for it to be abused as a method of lowering (labor) costs in a way that also lowers educational quality and effectiveness. This is a serious and realistic concern, particularly as long as personalized learning is framed as a product rather than a set of teaching strategies.
Moodle Moves Give Hints of What a Post-Fork World Could Look Like
Phil and I have written about the growing tension between the interests of Moodle HQ and a those of a couple of the bigger Moodle Partners, most notably Blackboard. There are a number of ways that this tension could be resolved, but one of the more dramatic possibilities would be a fork of Moodle. While […]
Is Open Education a Movement?
Phil and I had a wonderful time co-keynoting the OpenEd 2015 conference. It was a hoot. Here is the spectacular graphic depiction of the keynote done by Tracy Kelly from BC Campus: And here is the post-keynote conversation that we had with the Virtually Connecting gang: There have also been some other interesting virtual conversations […]
Live Stream for Wednesday’s OpenEd Keynote
Phil and I will be giving a joint keynote to the OpenEd conference the day after tomorrow—Wednesday, 11/18—at 8:30 AM Pacific Standard Time. You can watch the live stream here. If you miss it live, don’t worry. The video will be available afterward at the same URL. For a modest license fee, all rights reserved. […]
What Schoology’s Venture Funding Means for the LMS Market
LMS vendor Schoology just raised $32 million in Series D venture capital funding, bringing the total that they’ve raised to just over $57 million. If you’ve never heard of them, that’s because they have mostly been focused on K12, where they are doing very well. But they have turned their attention to US higher ed […]