e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • A Promotion

    Last week I was promoted from senior program manager for the apps program for MindTap (called MindApps, aptly enough) to senior program manager for all of MindTap. In the short run, this means that my light blogging schedule will continue for a while as I adjust to my new position—probably at least through the end of the summer. But if you can be a little patient, I expect to have lots to say, as I am learning a ton and rethinking a lot of my positions about the future of educational technology.

    I am very, very excited about MindTap, not only because I think it’s a great product in and of itself, but also because it is a sign that we are finally breaking the log jam that has been impeding large-scale innovation in educational technology for the past decade. I’ll be talking about this (and demonstrating MindTap) in my closing keynote at the Moodle Moot next week in California and expect to have a screencast demo of MindTap posted here to e-Literate relatively soon afterward.

  • Blackboard Has Been Acquired

    You may or may not have heard the news that Blackboard has agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm called Providence Equity for a total of $1.64 billion. Ray Henderson has a blog post about the acquisition here. I’m still completely overwhelmed trying to get up to speed on my new job, so I won’t have time to write an analysis of the deal. Lucky for you, Jim Farmer has offered to write one—in two parts, no less. I’m always interested to learn Jim’s perspective, particularly on financial and legal analysis. His first post will be up shortly.

  • Upcoming Conferences and Presentations

    This is just a quick note to let you know about some of my upcoming activities:

  • Textbook Publishers and OERs

    Not too long ago, The Chronicle ran an piece called “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources.” The meat of the article was some quotes of textbook company executives on a panel at an SIIA conference speaking out against a provision in a United States Department of Labor grants program that requires course materials being produced for grant-supported courses to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Here’s a taste of their comments:

    “I think it’s very dangerous for them to be in the product business,” said Bill Hughes, vice president of business development and innovation at Pearson Education.

    “There’s no free lunch,” said James Kourmadas, vice president of strategic marketing at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

    “I fear when big bucks from government is put into certain places, it actually stops pushing people to innovate,” said Kevin Wiggen, chief technology officer of Blackboard Xythos….

    “I think what the industry says is that we don’t see the point in the government collecting up taxpayer money and trying to rebuild an industry from scratch,” said Mr. Kourmadas of McGraw-Hill.

    To my esteemed fellow textbook industry professionals, I reply,

    Dudes. Seriously? (more…)

  • What We Don’t Know About Learning Analytics

    Long-time e-Literate readers know that I have been a fan of the concept of learning analytics for a number of years now. But it became apparent at this year’s Learning Impact conference that learning analytics are the new hotness. Everybody is talking about them, and increasing numbers of vendors (LMS vendors, ERP vendors, textbook vendors, etc.) are trying to figure out how to get in on the party.

    Which means it’s probably time to start asking some critical questions about how well we really understand learning analytics and where the potential for failure and disappointment might be.

    (more…)

  • Notes on the IMS Learning Impact Conference

    This year’s Learning Impact conference was the best attended that I can remember. The conference is also getting closer to what I would consider to be a healthy balance between vendors and university folks. This post is going to hit some quick standards news items that emerged out of the conference. I will follow up with a separate post on my musings regarding learning analytics that were inspired by a panel discussion.

    (more…)

  • Desire2Learn Product Updates

    I had a chance to speak to some folks about their latest product release (9.2) a couple of weeks back and am only now finding time to blog about it.

    First, there’s what they’re doing with the LMS itself. No surprise, one of their areas of focus is on user experience improvement, with reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform tasks being a prominent item on the agenda. Pretty much all the LMS developers are working on this right now. One fundamental problem with LMS design in general has always been that it’s a Swiss army knife. Everything is crammed into it. That’s not a recipe for great usability. On top of that, the fundamental user experience architecture of all these platforms is now about a decade old. It’s built in the model of enterprise groupware circa 2000, when people are increasingly expecting an experience consistent with Web 2.0 software circa 2010. So a facelift is in order. A second thing they are doing is embedding audio recording wherever attachments can be done in the UI. Ubiquitous audio and video recording are going to be pretty much required in an LMS platform within a year or two.

    But beyond that, D2L is putting a lot of effort to fine tune their rubric, learning objective, selective release, assessment, and content modules to make it easier for schools to move in the direction of competency modeling and adaptive learning. This is not an easy path for an institution to follow, so D2L is putting a lot of care into lowering the barriers, both by making it easy to approach the problem piecemeal (e.g., no longer requiring learning objectives in order to use rubrics) while simultaneously making it easy to add new pieces once you’ve started (e.g., enabling selective release to trigger off of rubric scores). To my mind, this web that D2L is weaving could be their compelling functional differentiator. Time will tell.

    We also talked about the company’s mobile strategy. D2L has no less than three mobile products now. The first, Desire2Learn 2Go, is a native app that links to the LMS. Right now it is Blackberry-only. 2Go is the company’s consumer-oriented product, which they envision being downloaded by students directly from smart phone app stores. Desire2Learn Mobile Web is essentially their browser-based product that fills roughly the same needs as 2Go, i.e., it’s mainly student learning-oriented. And finally their new product, Desire2Learn Campus Life, is a mobile campus portal that competes with Blackboard’s Mobile Central. It supports pushing a variety of apps—campus calendar, campus news, dining hall info, sports info, etc.—to mobile apps for Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This release is focused on getting pre-built functionality out the door, while next release will be more about delivering an SDK so that campuses can develop their own apps. When I asked D2L about what their differentiators are vis-a-vis Mobile Central, their answer was basically “stay tuned.” The mobile campus portal space is quickly becoming crowded with players like SunGard getting into the game and the Jasig community announcing the start of the uMobile initiative, so it should be interesting to watch.

    Finally, my old friend Al Essa, former Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and former CIO of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, will be heading up the development of D2L’s analytics product. Al is a deep thinker who has been focused on learning analytics for the past couple of years. I look forward to seeing what he can cook up in the next year or two.

    My talk with D2L happened before their announcement about acquiring a lecture capture hardware and software product suite, so I don’t have anything new to add regarding that development at the moment.