e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

    Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

    Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

    This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

    Source: Taptu via GigaOm

    Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

    Source: The New York Times

    We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

    This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

    I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

  • The Coming Digital Textbook Wave

    Xplana has published some interesting growth projections on digital textbooks in the U.S. higher education market. If you’ve been frustrated by the slow adoption rate, then you’ll like what they have to say. First of all, and unsurprisingly, they see the proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., the iPad and other tablets, netbooks, smart phones, etc.) as one of the drivers of the change. As I have written here before, I believe the lack of a ubiquitous form factor that works well for eBooks has been a very serious limiting factor on the growth of digital textbooks in general and OERs in particular. But here’s the passage of the report that really caught my eye:

    Current product publishing and finance forecasting within textbook publishing are based on traditional models of print textbooks sales. Viable textbook projects are generally required to have projected revenues of at least 6X plant costs in order to justify company investment. Within this traditional model, digital textbook sales are currently counted as incremental volume, or as added revenue (again, incremental to print), when bundled with a course cartridge or internal assessment solution.

    Once digital textbook sales reach 13%, however, the finance model breaks down significantly as digital textbooks are no longer incremental and, instead, actually begin to pirate print sales deeply (6.5% decrease in revenue on the average title). When digital textbooks sales reach 20% of new textbook sales, based on current production and revenue models, textbook publishers will see a 10% decrease in revenues and a 13% decrease in project margin. At this point, publishers will have little choice but to change product, production and distribution strategies in favor of digital versus print.

    Impact of Digital Text Sales on Print RevenuesTextbook publishers shoehorn their digital textbook sales into a pretty traditional revenue model. It’s an afterthought rather than a main driver, and it usually gets treated that way. But there is a tipping point. Once digital textbooks begin to cannibalize a surprisingly low percentage of traditional print sales (13%), then the traditional revenue model for textbooks starts to fall apart quickly. At that point (which the Xplana authors project to hit some time in 2014),  expect the textbook publishers to become a lot more aggressive about eTextbooks if they haven’t already. It will be life or death for them then.

    But that’s not the end of their worries:

    Currently, textbook publisher production models are based on print workflows. Digital textbooks are created at the end of the production cycle when compositors create final production-ready files. As sales of digital textbooks begin to cannibalize print sales, and as their inevitable future as the replacement of print textbooks becomes more apparent, publishers will be forced to alter current production workflows to favor a digital-first process with POD available from XML files and templates.

    Textbook publishers have production models that are optimized for producing—wait for it—textbooks. Many of them are going to have to retool their processes in order to make their costs manageable when their main product is digital.

    It’s not all bad news for them, though. Even though the costs of the digital textbooks will significantly lower than paper textbooks, the publishers may make up the revenues by “renting” the textbooks via some form of DRM. Basically, it will kill the used textbook market, which hurts their sales badly within a couple years of producing a book and forces them to invent reasons to create new editions in order to keep selling. Students, in turn get lower prices for assets that they usually don’t want to own after the end of the semester anyway. Prices will come down for this reason alone. Add to that the increased competition from new entrants, including but not limited to OERs, and there should be significant downward price pressure on college textbook costs in the next five years. Given that the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that textbooks and supplies account for 72% of the cost of a 2-year college education, that’s a pretty important change.

    Update: You can find the GAO report here.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part IV

    Here’s the fourth of five installments from our good friends at the University of North Carolina Sakai Pilot blog—this one on public versus private content:

  • DIY U: Digital Apprenticeship and the Modern Guild

    A while back, I had the pleasure of chatting with Paul Lefrere. Paul is a guy who thinks about large-scale questions like, “How can we create and fill a couple of million green jobs in a country within a couple of years?” One problem he was grappling with regarding higher education was time-to-market for students. He needed to get them working and productive in less than four years—and possibly less than two. One idea he talked about was what he called “digital apprenticeship.” Imagine a solar panel installation trainee wearing a helmet with a wireless webcam on it. You could have an expert watching her work virtually, either coaching her through the steps in a process or testing her by watching her perform the process and then certifying that she’s done it right. She could be both a productive worker and a student on a long-term educational path on day one.

    More recently, Jim Groom suggested that apprenticeship might be a good model for networked learning, particularly for those students who are not auto-didactic. ((It’s worth noting that, while we tend to refer to “auto-didacts” as if there is a special class of people who can learn everything on their own, the truth of the matter is that many people can be auto-didactic in some subjects and not in others. For example, I’m pretty good at teaching myself many kinds of book learning but am not good at all when it comes to figuring out how to, say, fix a squeaky floor board or replace the switch in my hallway light, even with detailed instructions. And I have given up all hope of ever teaching myself how to juggle. I could learn to do all of these things, but I would need coaching, because I’m not good at noticing what I’m doing wrong—or sometimes even whether I’m doing wrong—in these areas.)) I think that Jim and Paul are both really onto something. Apprenticeship is a model that is well understood, can work for a variety of topics in less formal settings, can get learners productive on certain tasks quickly, and can get the benefits of scale by using modern communications technologies. At the same time, it’s one thing to have a model that works well in theory and quite another to have a set of practices that are likely to be adopted widely under given social and economic conditions. So in this post, I’m going to consider the question of what it would take to embed apprenticeship into the fabric of our society as a broadly accepted career path across a wide range of career types.

    (more…)

  • Come to the Sakai 2010 Conference in Denver

    If you are Sakai-curious and want to know more about the platform and the community, you should come to the conference, which is going to be June 15-17 in Denver this year. I am delighted to say that our keynote speaker will be Anya Kamenetz.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part III

    Here’s the third of five installments from our good friends at the University of North Carolina Sakai Pilot blog:

    For those who need to adopt an LMS before Sakai 3 will be ready but worry about making the migration, take a look at the progress being made in melding Sakai 2 with Sakai 3:

    Depending on how quickly Lance progresses and your own time line, it might be possible to introduce Sakai 2 within the Sakai 3 navigation from the very beginning in order to make the ultimate migration to Sakai 3 easier. We’re not quite there yet, and you’d want to look closely at the pros and cons, but it’s a possibility to consider.

  • Moodle 2.0 Versus Blackboard 9.0/9.1

    Here’s a video highlighting some of the features in Moodle 2.o, which is expected to be released some time in the next couple of months:

    You can see a video of Blackboard 9.1 highlights here. (Sorry, it’s not embeddable.) Note that neither of these videos are “official”; they are both made by adopters.

    It’s interesting to note that the highlights list of the Moodle 2.0 release has a fair bit of overlap with the highlights of the Blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 releases:

    • Both tout improved usability
    • Specific improvements in test creation usability
    • Both now support searching for and embedding external media (e.g., YouTube videos, Creative Commons-licensed photographs, etc.) within their UIs.
    • Both now support mobile clients
    • Wikis (new in Blackboard 9.0, improved in Moodle 2.0)
    • Improved support for blogs

    Developing a good LMS is hard and I happen to think that both development teams have done some good work on improving their respective platforms. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of that frustration of the edupunks when looking at these highlights. For example, I have been able to search for and embed videos and images inside of WordPress for years now. There is a balance that needs to be struck between creating a coherent, supportable environment and getting out of the way of the unbelievable pace of innovation on the consumer web. We’re making some progress toward that balance, but we’re clearly not there yet.