e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Instructure Goes Open Source

    Update: The video was briefly broken as Instructure inexplicably chose the day after their big announcement to change their YouTube account. I have updated the post with the new URL and it should be working now. Note that anybody else who linked to Instructure’s videos before today is going to have the same problem. The new channel for Instructure’s videos is http://www.youtube.com/canvaslms.

    Instructure has just announced that they will be releasing an open source version of their Canvas LMS product. Between this announcement, the winning of the Utah Education Network contract (109,000 college students and 40,000 K12 students), and the oh-so-ever-brief lawsuit by Desire2Learn about that win, Instructure has been making quite a splash lately. In this post, I’m going to look a little more closely at the company, the software, and the business model.

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  • CSU Chico Upgrades from Vista to Blackboard 9.1

    As a follow-up to my two–part series on LMS market share, I am tracking news development about adoption announcements, particularly of Vista schools. Today brings word that CSU Chico is moving from Vista to Blackboard 9.1.

  • OER and Standards

    Speaking of that $2 billion initiative by the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education that everybody is buzzing about, it turns out that, not only does it mandate a license for the educational resources it funds (CC-BY), it also mandates an interchange format. Namely SCORM. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS, has posted a long rant about why he thinks this is a bad idea. I don’t endorse all of Rob’s criticisms of SCORM, but I strongly agree with the point that SCORM and IMS Common Cartridge (the other main contender for a standard educational content interchange format) have substantially different affordances that are appropriate for substantially different use cases.

    I understand why the Federal government wants to mandate a particular standard for content reuse, but I think it’s a mistake in this case. Educational content re-use is highly context-dependent, which means that no one standard is going to support all or even most of the relevant use cases. There will be times when SCORM is the best, times when IMS Common Cartridge is the best, times when RSS/Atom is the best, and times when just plain old HTML is really all that you need. Imposing a SCORM requirement for all resources will substantially increase the labor involved in producing them without necessarily bringing a payoff. The likely result will be fewer grantees will produce OERs and fewer of the OERs produced will be re-used.

    The better thing to do would be to require that grantees include in their proposal a plan for promoting re-use, which would include the selection of appropriate format standards.

  • You, Too, Can Sponsor an OER Revolution

    The internets are buzzing with the news of the $2 billion grant program jointly offered by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor. There was some initial hype (driven partly by a blog post on CreativeCommons.org) that the grant would go toward creating $2 billion of open educational resources. However, while the grant program does require that curricular materials created under its auspices be released under a creative commons license, there is no requirement that the grant money go toward creating curricular materials in the first place. According to a spokesperson from the Department of Education,

    “[A]t this point, as the solicitation phase is just beginning, we don’t know how much of the $2B (or even $500-million in the first year) will be spent on open educational resources.”

    She added, “All of the intellectual property that is created as a result of the grants has to be shared as OERs, and it would be accurate to say that the money is available to fund open educational resources, but there is no guarantee all those funds—or even any of those funds—will be spent for that purpose. The applicants have to make their case that what they propose will help students finish college more reliably with market-ready skills, degrees and certificates. We think OERs will be an important part of that. But how much? We can’t say yet.”

    Bummer.

    But dispair not, dear reader. There are still plenty of opportunities to move OER forward—with your help. Case in point: smARThistory needs just $10,000 to generate the 100 more OER art history videos they need to provide a complete textbook replacement.

    Take a look:

    Make your donation to this project today at KickStarter.

  • Desire2Learn Drops UEN Suit

    I was able to speak with Desire2Learn Director of Marketing John McLeod to confirm that his comment on my previous post means what it appears to mean:

    All vendors enter every RFP process with the view that the process will be fair and equitable. We all invest resources to respond to RFPs, make presentations, and demonstrate our capabilities. In virtually every case, we accept the decision.

    Michael is correct, Utah law requires that a protest be made within 5 days of a decision, and an appeal – which must be filed in court – be made within 14 days of a denial. We have requested materials under Utah’s freedom of information laws. We will carefully review the materials when we receive them to better understand this process.

    Out of respect for institutions in Utah and our desire to concentrate on serving our customers, we are immediately dropping this appeal. We want to reassure everyone that our focus continues to be on improving education.

    On the phone, John re-iterated that Desire2Learn’s motivation was to better understand the decision-making process and making sure that it was fair.

    It would behoove colleges and universities to become more sophisticated about this sort of thing. On the one hand, ethics laws exist for a reason and, as one commenter on the previous post noted, it is perfectly reasonable for a company to want to ensure that those ethics laws were followed. (I recommend reading the whole comments thread, by the way; the range of perspectives is interesting.) On the other hand, these challenges definitely get abused sometimes. So it should be routine for schools to share information about these sorts of things when they happen, but also to be careful to get all the facts. Every situation is different.

    In fact, this whole situation might have played out differently had more of the details of the process been pro-actively published in the first place. That’s not a criticism of UEN; I recognize that there are all kinds of reasons why it is difficult (and sometimes even legally impossible) to share some of this. But in general, I do think that schools would benefit greatly by taking a position of publishing all evaluation process information by default and only making private what needs to be private, rather than the other way around. This change would require some non-trivial rethinking of processes and policies, as well as significant extra work, but the end result would be better contract negotiations based on shared data and best practices from peer schools as well as fewer (though higher quality) challenges after the fact.

  • Desire2Learn Sues UEN Over Instructure Contract

    This was reported in The Salt Lake Tribune and, more recently, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As I have mentioned here previously, startup LMS developer Instructure recently won an LMS bid for the 140,000-student Utah Education Network (UEN).  Now, UEN, as a consortium of public schools, is bound by state laws regarding contract bidding. In their complaint, Desire2Learn alleges that (a) an employee of Instructure had been an employee of UEN or one of its membership schools at the time that the selection criteria were created and was involved with their creation (which would presumably be a violation of state conflict of interest laws) and (b) that UEN didn’t follow the selection criteria published in its RFP (which would presumably be a violation of the state’s procurement laws).

    These suits are a lot more common than most people realize. They usually happen either (a) because there genuinely was an unfair selection process (which definitely happens) or (b) because the litigating company is just using the lawsuit as a competitive bludgeon (which also definitely happens). It’s not immediately clear from the publicly available data which might be the case here. Certainly, nothing I have seen or heard yet comes remotely close to being a smoking gun regarding misconduct in the selection process. But there’s not much that’s publicly available yet.

    Here’s what we do know that should put some context around this:

    • According to Utah state law, if a company thinks there was something amiss with an award process, that company has five days to file a protest with the organization that granted the award.
    • Desire2Learn did file a protest within five days.
    • If the protest is rejected, then the challenging company has fourteen days to file an appeal.
    • UEN did reject D2L’s protest, and D2L did file for an appeal within fourteen days.
    • In order to get access to the kind of information that would, in fact, show whether there had been any hanky panky in the selection process, you’d need to request the process documentation from UEN via Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), which is the state’s equivalent to the Federal Freedom of Information Act.
    • Given the way these bureaucratic information request processes go, it is very likely that any company that thinks there might have been misconduct would have to file suit before it was able to gain access to the information that they’d need to prove it. This encourages a practice of filing a placeholder lawsuit before the facts are in.

    Based on the above, it might not make sense to read too much into this lawsuit at this point. At the moment, all we can be sure of is that Desire2Learn is preserving their right to challenge the decision. We won’t really get a sense of the true nature of the suit or the motives of the company until we get a few more moves into the chess game. I will report on the developments as I learn more.

    As a side note, I think it is important for these sorts of challenges to be more widely known in the education community whenever they happen, for transparency’s sake. If anybody is aware of such challenges taking place, please let me know.

    I have published both Desire2Learn’s protest and UEN’s response below the fold.

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  • Anonymous Commenting

    In all the years that I’ve been blogging, I can count the number of non-spam comments that I’ve deleted on one hand. In all cases they have been egregious trolls, and in all cases they have been by a person or persons who have used fake names and email addresses. Not all anonymous posting is motivated out of spite, of course. Whistle blowing is on the other end of this spectrum. Most often, at least in the context of this blog, the motivations of anonymous posters fall in the gray area in between those two ends of the spectrum. It’s usually somebody who wants to make a critical comment but fears some sort of negative response. I can appreciate that concern. Sometimes its legitimate. Sometimes it’s just cowardly. And sometimes it’s a bit of both.

    This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I want to encourage people to make honest, useful comments without fear. On the other hand, I also want to encourage—in fact, I want to insist—that people take responsibility for the statements that they make here on my blog.

    So I’ve come up with a new policy. From now on, ((I won’t apply this policy retroactively to comments that have been posted before now.)) if I see a comment that I suspect is being made under a pseudonym, and it is not immediately obvious to me why the commenter has a legitimate and compelling reason to remain anonymous, then I will send an email to the address provided by that person requesting an explanation. If the person responds with even a halfway reasonable explanation, then I’ll let the comment stand. But if I don’t get a response, or if I discover that I’ve been given a fake email address, I will delete the comment immediately, regardless of the merits of the content. To reiterate: If you want to comment on e-Literate and you choose to conceal your identity from e-Literate readers, you must (a) make your identity known to me by giving me a real email address and (b) be prepared to convince me that you have a compelling reason to remain anonymous. The burden is on the anonymous (or, more accurately, the pseudonymous) commenters to convince me that I should let them wear masks when they are in my house and talking to my guests.

    This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I can come up with.