e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)

    No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple motivations and maybe because the desire for scale is not something that is polite to talk about due to a certain amount of discomfort with it. But the motivation is definitely there if you look closely, as I’ll get into in a bit.

    The problem is that both of these approaches, in their current incarnations, miss one absolutely critical element of the teaching process. As you can probably guess from all the qualifiers I am using in my language, I don’t think it’s an inherent or permanent failing. But I worry that it’s a failing due to a deep cultural blind spot that we have about what education is, and that it therefore will be challenging to address.

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  • Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?

    Before I get started, let me just say that Phil can vouch for the fact that I had already planned to use “Pets.com” in the title of this post before MIT Technology Review used it in their article on Minerva. As we’ll see, there are reasons to reach for that particular analogy at this particular moment in educational technology.

    Anyway, it’s an uncomfortable truth for educational folks that one of the principal innovations of the xMOOC is the store front. It is the ability to find courses in a catalog. If you look at what Coursera is right now from a platform perspective, it is primarily a store front on top of an LMS. The same could be said of edX. And as Phil and I have both written about recently, this is also the primary innovation in Instructure’s Canvas Network. I don’t expect that innovations in MOOC platforms to stay confined to the store front in the long run; for example, Daphne Koller, the co-CEO of Coursera, is also a leading expert in Bayesian machine learning. I think the scale of usage will drive other innovations. But right now, it’s the store front that is the most obvious differentiator between an LMS and a MOOC platform. As we game out which of the various xMOOC entrants will be successful, it’s important to understand how the store front works and the degree to which the growth of one dominant platform could impact the ways that colleges and universities function. I think there are at least three possibilities.

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  • Going to EDUCAUSE

    I’ll be at EDUCAUSE this week, on my last hurrah with members of my Cengage crew.

    See you there!

  • Everybody Wants to MOOC the World

    You may have seen this week’s announcement from Instructure of their new Canvas Network to support MOOCs and other open courses. Blackboard has already been dipping its toe in this water, having had Curtiss Bonk run a MOOC on CourseSites. I also find it significant that Blackboard (somewhat awkwardly) made an attempt to remind the market of this fact on the same day as Instructure’s announcement. I predict that “MOOC” will reach the same level of hype at this year’s EDUCAUSE conference that “open” did last year.

    But hype aside, it’s worth asking what it means for the traditional LMS players to be marketing themselves as platforms for MOOCs and other open courses.

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  • I’m Starting a Consulting Practice

    It’s been a wild year-and-a-half working at Cengage Learning. I got to work on a project that I believe is one of the best educational technology ideas that I’ve seen in the last decade. I got to manage a product team and budget for the go-forward, mission-critical digital product of a company with a billion dollars in annual revenue. I got to see the stresses and turmoil of the digital transition of the textbook industry from the inside. And I got to work with some incredible people. But ultimately, it turned out not to be the long-term professional home I was hoping it would be. So, with much excitement and some trepidation, I have decided to go independent and launch a consulting practice. November 9th will be my last day at Cengage. Then, after a week’s vacation, I will be off to Europe for a little while, where I will be working with a textbook publisher that I will be helping to think through their digital transformation. But beyond that, I’m not sure. There are a number of possibilities.

    When I started this blog eight years ago, I was in the midst of a similar transition. I had just shut down a startup that I had put together with some friends. I had some ideas about what I might want to do next, but I wasn’t sure which were the best and, equally importantly, I wasn’t sure which ones I could actually get somebody to pay me for. I figured that if I blogged about what I was thinking about, then the responses from my readers might teach me something about which ideas were actually valuable to other people. At the risk of being self-indulgent (or self-promotional), I’m going to use this post to lay out some types of problems that I’d like to be working on going forward. I’m just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks at this point, and I’d love to hear what you think. I’ll also lay out how this change of direction will influence e-Literate.

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  • Michael Chasen Leaving Blackboard

    In case you haven’t heard the news yet, Blackboard has hired a new CEO—Jay Bhatt, previously the CEO of Progress Software. According to Mr. Chasen’s “open letter to the education community,” he will be participating in the transition for the next few months. No word yet on what he will do after that. Ray Henderson has an interesting reflection blog post up about the transition.

    I’m sure we’ll have more coverage of this event here on e-Literate in the coming days and weeks as we learn more and have time to think about what it means.

  • Please Fill Out the Campus Computing Survey

    This is an incredible time of change in the United States higher education LMS market. Here are just some of the relevant developments that are driving big movements:

    • WebCT is in its last year of Blackboard support, forcing many campuses to migrate either to Blackboard or to something else.
    • Instructure is on an absolute tear, growing at an unprecedented rate.
    • Blackboard acquired Moodlerooms, the best known Moodle support vendor in this market.
    • Desire2Learn got a major infusion of cash, presumably based on their own market success.
    • Recent turmoil in the Sakai OAE project is causing the Sakai community to go through a period of reflection and retrenchment.
    • New LMS entrants are coming into the market right and left, including but not limited to MOOC platforms like Coursera.

    We all have our observations and intuitions about what all of this adds up to in terms of the big picture. But if you really want to know what is going on, there is only one place to go to get reliable, solid, proven data: the Campus Computing Project. I know that campus folk get inundated with surveys on top of the increasingly onerous workloads. But if you want a clear picture of what is going on in the LMS market today, then I urge you to fill out the Campus Computing survey or, if you are not the person responsible for doing so, then let the person on your campus who is responsible know just how important you think the survey is. The survey closes on October 24th and goes public at EDUCAUSE on November 7th.

    Please take this seriously.