As many of you know, Phil and I have been exploring the topic of “personalized learning” for the past year, trying to figure out what the heck it means and what it’s really good for, separate from the hype. We’ve boiled down the idea into the beginnings of a framework, which we’ve just had published in EDUCAUSE Review. The central focus is to think of “personalized learning” as a set of technology-supported teaching practices that un depersonalize teaching. While we’re exploring that, we also dive into the question of why hype happens, why the hype cycle exists, and how we can try to kill it.
Blackboard’s VP of Teaching and Learning, Valerie Schreiner, was kind enough to give Phil and me a fairly thorough update on the Ultra strategy on Wednesday. Their strategy is clearer to me now. That strategy, which I am about to share with you, is fairly coherent, reasonably interesting, and practically plausible in principle. There are still big execution questions that won’t be answered until we see what is released at BbWorld and talk to some customers. (More on this later.) But at least we have a better sense of what they are trying to do now.
We don’t usually spend this much sustained time focusing on one company and product, but since we are getting a lot of feedback from readers that it is helpful and timely for them, and since Blackboard has been extremely responsive in providing us with clarifications, we’re going to stay on this one until we feel that it’s been adequately covered.
After Monday’s post on my confusion with Blackboard’s overall Learn strategy, I thought I would follow up with a reminder that there is one really important area where there are strong early signs that Blackboard is doing something right in a very important area: learning analytics. Learning analytics is one of those areas where there are many, many people talking and very few who are actually making sense. Blackboard has been hiring people that I usually call up when I have learning analytics questions and want to talk to somebody whose answers will actually make sense. To start with, they hired John Whitmer, who I have praised on this blog before. To get a flavor of who he is, here’s a talk that he gave when he was still back working at CSU:
If you’ve heard John give a talk post-hire (as you will have a chance to do a little later in this post), you’ll know that he is just as straight-talking, funny, and insightful now as then. And from our observations both at BbWorld 2015 and since, he appears to be in a position of significant influence within the company.
More recently, the company has hired Mike Sharkey to run their whole analytics group as part of their acquisition of his company, Blue Canary. Like John, he is one of those all too rare people who is both very good at explaining how learning analytics work and very comfortable calling BS on hype. It was a little tougher to find a recording of one of Mike’s talks for some reason, but here’s one of him when he was at the University of Phoenix:
Also recently, the company acquired X-Ray, a learning analytics product that was developed for Moodle and that Blackboard eventually intends to make available for Learn. Although the product itself is interesting, one of the motivations for the acquisition was that it included creator Sasha Dietrichson. I haven’t met Sasha yet but he has a reputation similar to that of John and Mike. I actually had the pleasure of attending Blackboard’s international launch event for X-Ray. I held off blogging about it because, in my opinion, the product still needed a little polish as of that event, but it’s worth bringing up in this context. You can see the whole event, including John’s presentation of the product, here:
(I recommend that you fast forward past the annoying animated commercial at the beginning.)
We haven’t yet seen these hires bear fruit in big ways (except arguably with X-Ray for the Moodle customers), but there are all the early indicators of a coherent investment in an analytics strategy that could turn into a major differentiator. So far, most of Instructure’s analytics work has been limited to making data available for others to use. And the last time we checked, D2L’s analytics strategy was stuck in the mud (although we are overdue for an update in that department and will be looking into it again soon). Furthermore, one major advantage of the new Learn SaaS architecture is that it provides infrastructure for learning analytics that would just not be possible on the older architecture. It’s hard for the company to tout that now when they don’t yet have products that show off the benefits. There is little question at this point that Blackboard grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take them to get the new architecture ready for prime time.
It’s possible that part of what we are seeing going on with Blackboard’s communications…er…strategy is that their product announcements (if, indeed, Ultra is a product) were so far out in front of delivery of any demonstrable benefits that it’s hard for anyone to explain the point of them without sounding completely pie-in-the-sky. Jay Bhatt felt a need, for whatever reason, to make grand pronouncements about how Blackboard was going to “transform education.” We criticized him for those comments at the time, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the damage he did through this penchant for grandiosity was more far-reaching than we imagined. But my larger point here is that, when I say that I am confused about what is going on in Blackboard, I really mean it. There may yet be a baby floating in this tub of stinky bathwater.
The good news is that Blackboard, after going quiet for a while, is out giving updates again. The bad news is that the more they talk, the less I understand. A year and a half ago, I thought that I understood their Ultra strategy and had a pretty good guess about their odds of executing it. Last summer, I felt much less sure about the execution but still reasonably comfortable that I understood the basic strategy. Now, after Phil’s update on their strategy, I am forced to admit that I understand what is happening in Blackboard right now about as well as I understand what is happening in the Republican Presidential primary. I’m generally pretty good at following this stuff, and even I have lost the thread. The messaging has gotten so garbled that I have lost confidence in my understanding of the company’s product vision and strategy.
Phil and I will be writing a twice-monthly column for the Chronicle’s new Re:Learning section. In my inaugural column, “Muy Loco Parentis,” I write about how schools make data privacy decisions on behalf of the students that the students wouldn’t make for themselves, and that may even be net harmful for the students. In contrast to the ways in which other campus policies have evolved, there is still very much a default paternalistic position regarding data.
But the one example that I didn’t cover in my piece happens to be the one that inspired it in the first place. A few months back at the OpenEd conference, I heard a presentation from CMU’s Norm Bier about that challenges of getting different schools to submit OLI student data to a common database for academic research. Basically, every school that wants to do this has to go through its own IRB process, and every IRB is different. Since the faculty using the OLI products usually aren’t engaged in the research themselves, it generally isn’t worth the hassle to go through this process, so the data doesn’t get submitted and the research doesn’t get done. Note that Pearson and McGraw Hill do not have this problem; if they want to look at student performance in a learning application across various schools, they can. Easily. Something is wrong with this picture. I proposed in Norm’s session that maybe students could be given an option to openly publish their data. Maybe that would get around the restrictions. David Wiley, who does a lot more academic research than I do, seemed to think this wasn’t a crazy idea, so I’ve been gnawing on the problem since then.
I have talked to a bunch of researchers about the idea. The first reaction is often skepticism. IRB is not so easy to circumvent (for good reason). What generally changed their minds was the following thought experiment:
Suppose that, in some educational software program, there was a button labeled “Export.” Students could click the button and export their data in some suitably anonymized format. (Yes, yes, it is impossible to fully de-identify data, but let’s posit “reasonably anonymized” as assessed by a community of data scientists.) Would giving students the option to export their data to any server of their choosing trigger the requirement for IRB review? [Answer: No.]
Suppose the export button offered a choice to export to CMU’s research server. Would giving students that option trigger the requirement for IRB review? [Answer: Probably not.]
There are two shades of gray here that are complications. First, researchers worry about the data bias that comes from opt in. And the further you lead students down the path toward encouraging them to share their data, such as making sharing the default, the more the uneasiness sets in. Second and relatedly, there is the issue of informed consent. There was a general feeling that, even if you get around IRB review, there is still a strong ethical obligation to do more than just pay lip service to informed consent. You need to really educate students on the potential consequences of sharing their data.
That’s all fair. I don’t claim that there is a silver bullet. But the thought experiment is revealing. Our intuitions, and therefore our policies, about student data privacy are strongly paternalistic in an academic context but shift pretty quickly once the institutional role fades and the student’s individual choice is foregrounded. I think this is an idea worth exploring further.
What is “Premium SaaS”? Is it managed hosting? Is it private cloud? What does it mean for current managed hosting customers? What we have found is that there doesn’t seem to be complete shared understanding even among the Blackboard management team about what the answers to these questions are.
A week later, (as I wrote at the time), the company acted to clarify the situation. We got some documentation on what the forthcoming SaaS tiers would look like and how they related to existing managed hosting options. Good on them for responding quickly and appropriately to criticism.
Now, half a year after the announcement, the company has released said SaaS offerings. Along with it, they put out an FAQ and a comparison of the tiers. So they said what they were going to do, they did it, and they said what they did. All good. But half a year later?
Ballhaus inherits a company with a number of problems. Their customers are increasingly unhappy with the support they are getting on the current platform, unclear about how they will be affected by future development plans, and unconvinced that Blackboard will deliver a next-generation product in the near future that will be a compelling alternative to the competitors in the market. Schools going out to market for an LMS seem less and less likely to take Blackboard serious as a contender, which is particularly bad news since a significant proportion of those schools are currently Blackboard schools. The losses have been incremental so far, but it feels like we are at an inflection point. The dam is leaking, and it could burst.
I expressed my concerns about the continuing patent problem that we have in educational technology.
Carl Straumsheim explained the defensive use of patents in more detail and in the process motivated me to take a look at the specifics of the patent agreement that Khan Academy signed.
I took an initial look at said agreement, known as the Innovator’s Agreement, and concluded that it was a step in the right direction but that I still had concerns.
Since then, I had a little more time to look at the actual legal language of the agreement and reflect on the larger edupatent problem. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Khan Academy did the right thing by adopting the agreement. We should feel good about what they’ve done. And given the realities that software patents exist and defensive patents are therefore a necessary evil, we should encourage other educational patent holders to do as Khan has done and adopt the same agreement.
