e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • The Blackboard/Moodle FOIA Requests

    Vicki Tambellini is reporting that a number of colleges who moved from Blackboard to Moodle are getting hit with Freedom of Information Act requests:

    Last week a number of institutions received FOIA requests from a law firm in Columbia, South Carolina.  The firm requests everything related to individual LMS procurements from the RFP process through the implementation.According to the letter I read,  Schmidt Copeland wants information that includes everything from procurement notes and evaluation materials to RFP responses in procurements where Blackboard was replaced by Moodle solutions.  The firm leaves no request unmentioned:  communications with vendors, consultants and recordings.  They want post-selection operating information including staffing, budgets and communications including trouble tickets.

    The request includes system loss, performance and up-time data requests.  Oh, and they’d like it in 10 days, please.  And in a less than subtle statement, the firm reminds the institution that if they don’t comply, it’s a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $750!

    I can confirm that at least one school in my area has received such a request.

    So what is this about?

    (more…)

  • The Changing Dynamics of the Educational Technology Markets

    Phil Hill has two good blog posts up in response to Blackboard’s announcement that it has received at least two “unsolicited non-binding proposals” for the company to be acquired. In his first post, Phil argues that, whatever the outcome of the bidding, Blackboard’s brand value will be hurt:

    In one dramatic shift, Blackboard has gone from the known to the unknown.  For years, one of Blackboard’s greatest sales strength was the message that it was here to stay.  Unlike that pesky Desire2Learn, who might succumb to lawyer’s bills and the patent fight, Blackboard was a solid investment with the corporate muscle to be here for the long haul.  Unlike those pesky open source providers, who might disappear or stop developing, Blackboard presented “one throat to choke” and was reliable.  Now, can anyone reliably guess what’s going to happen to Blackboard, who will provide services, whether the roadmap will completely change?

    This sales advantage is now gone.

    I’m somewhat agonistic on this point. I see Phil’s argument, but the size of the impact may be significantly different depending on whether the acquirer somebody like McGraw Hill, somebody like News Corp., or if no acquisition comes through (which I think is the most likely scenario). I don’t have a strong gut feeling about how much this changes the sales conversation.

    In his second post, Phil takes issue with one of my previous posts:

    Michael is right and you should read the whole post and its second part, but I have a different opinion on the conclusions.  I agree with the conclusions that…

    by 2014 we may see it beginning to change the whole picture for educational technology infrastructure in some fundamental ways. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be an interesting ride.,

    but I am less inclined to rely on straight-line projections of market data to look ahead, and am more inclined to think the market changes we are seeing are driven by outside forces with potentially nonlinear effects.  Rome may have been weakened from within, but when real change happened, the Visigoths made it happen….

    Today, there is a flood of new money into the educational technology market.  In addition to the potential acquisition of Blackboard, Instructure just raised $8M in venture funding and vying for the role of Alaric in their marketing position, Pearson has been heavily investing in Learning Studio (eCollege for you old-timers), and Moodlerooms raised $7+M in venture funding.  Publishing companies, ERP vendors, private equity, venture funding – these are major disruptive forces.  And there is still significant moves being made by technology companies such as Google.

    Whatever happens with the potential acquisition of Blackboard, expect to see a different market emerge, with new dynamics.  For higher education institutions – is your academic technology strategy ready to handle the changes in the market?

    I’m not sure that we actually disagree. I also believe that there are some pretty massive changes taking place in the educational technology markets. The only question I would raise is whether those changes will hit quickly enough to substantially change the likely outcome of the evaluations that WebCT and ANGEL customers are going to have to complete in the next 24 months.

    Let’s dig into the details a little and see what we can figure out.

    (more…)

  • Moodlerooms and the Cambridge Global Grid for Learning

    I know it’s been a little quiet here on e-Literate since I started gearing up for my (awesome) new job. Posts are likely to be sporadic for a while longer yet. But fear not, Dear Reader, for I have not forgotten you. I do have a backlog of posts that I intend to get to whenever I can squeeze out some time.

    I’m going to start with a topic that’s been in my queue for some time now. A while back, I wrote a post comparing Moodlerooms’ content deal with Cambridge University Press to Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. It turns out that my assumptions about that deal were wrong. This matters for several reasons. First, I take pride in giving you accurate information, and in this case I didn’t. But beyond that, the nature of these deals can tell us a lot both about the shifting landscape of the relationships between LMS providers and publishers as well as the growth of new sustainability models for educational content. Both of these dynamics will be important to watch.

    Cambridge Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) is a new and somewhat experimental division of Cambridge University Press. They refer to themselves as “digital content brokers.” They aggregate content from about 40 different providers, such as Reuters and Corbis. They then hand curate the content, weeding out items that aren’t appropriate (their current target market is primary and secondary, although they have plans for higher and further education) and tag it in ways that will make it easier for teachers to find. The assets are pretty granular, so articles and images and videos rather than whole courses. But all items in the collection have been copyright cleared for use in courses. GGfL has plans to begin pulling OERs into their collection as well, thus providing a single portal for finding free and fee content.

    Pricing is relatively cheap. Right now, a high school can license their entire library for $1,795 USD. Their current model is one license for everything, but they eventually want to provide license options by collection or even by asset, and they want to link the content to metadata on learning outcomes. And contrary to my earlier reporting, their deal with Moodlerooms is quite different than Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. According to Tom Murdock, Moodlerooms’ co-founder and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms customers will all have access to a basic GGfL subscription bundled with their Moodlerooms support contract, with the option to upgrade their GGfL contract for a fee. In return, GGfL will promote Moodlerooms to their customers who may be looking for an LMS. Unlike the Blackboard/MGH deal, which is essentially a portal deal in which MGH pays Blackboard for access to their customers, the Moodlerooms/GGfL deal is a cross-selling partnership. No money is actually changing hands between the two companies.

  • Desire2Learn Enters the Mobile Portal Business

    This is interesting. I have previously argued that, of Blackboard’s two mobile businesses, their LMS mobile business (a.k.a. Mobile Learn) is going to come under lots of pressure to get bundled with the platform as the competition does just that, while their mobile portal business (a.k.a. Mobile Central) is likely to be a viable business for at least the next few years. Desire2Learn apparently agrees, because they have just entered the mobile portal business. Their Campus Life product appears to be a direct competitor with Blackboard Mobile Central. Details are somewhat sparse (on both products, actually, but particularly on D2L’s), but I’ll write more about this as I learn more.

  • Global Trends in Education Costs?

    I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with Rosa Maria Torres regarding Anya Kamenetz’s graph on the cost of higher education in the U.S. She made the fair point that the graph should be labeled so that readers know the data is for the United States (which I have now done). She also asserted that the trend is probably true for OECD countries in general but maybe not for others. Since it was Twitter, we couldn’t really have a full conversation about it, but her assertion makes me curious. First of all, I’d love to see comparative data on the costs of education over time for different geographical regions. But this wouldn’t really get at the heart of the matter, since many countries in the developing world are at very different points in the higher education adoption/diffusion curve than the developed world. So it’s hard to tell from a data snapshot whether some countries are on a different trajectory or just on a different place in the same trajectory.

    What I’d like to know is whether there are alternative school funding models in the developing world that people believe are (a) likely to be sustainable based on an established track record and real data, and (b) avoid some of the structural features of Western (or Northern) educational institutions and funding mechanisms that lead to massive inflation.

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  • Why Higher Education Is In Trouble–In One Graph

    Here’s a graph from a recent presentation by Anya Kamenetz:

    U.S. Tuition Costs Over Time

    The word that comes to mind is “Yikes!”

    Here’s the full preso: