e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • Future Trends Forum on Thursday

    Future Trends Forum on Thursday

    On Thursday, June 29th at 2pm EDT I will be participating in a Future Trends Forum discussion with Bryan Alexander. The topic will be the LMS Market and the future of learning platforms. The Future Trends Forum uses the Shindig platform and is designed to allow active conversations and not just Bryan interviewing his guests.

    Each week a different guest – an inspiring expert, visionary, practitioner, or researcher – speaks to their area of interest. I kick off the discussion with a question or two, then facilitate further questions and comments generated by participants via text, video, and Twitter. And discussion is the name of the game, as we avoid PowerPoint and encourage the entire audience to actively engage.

    We’d love to see you join us. You can RSVP at this page (I’m the Tom Hanks at the beginning of Castaway; Bryan is the one whose best friend is Wilson) – give your name and email, and you get a reminder and link to event. No downloads needed.

  • First Board Meeting For Kaplan / Purdue University: Tuition Levels Set

    First Board Meeting For Kaplan / Purdue University: Tuition Levels Set

    Last week was the first meeting for the board of trustees for NewU, the working name for Kaplan University now that it has been “acquired” by Purdue University. And yes, the scare quotes are intentional given the $1 purchase price. I’ll give the group high marks for transparency by the press release.

    In its inaugural regular meeting, the Board of Trustees for Purdue’s new affiliated institution, currently referred to as NewU, approved plans to offer a dramatic tuition discount for Indiana resident students and free tuition for Purdue employees.  The new Indiana resident rate, also approved by Kaplan University’s trustees, will take effect at the beginning of KU’s next academic term. [snip]

    An Indiana resident student pursuing an associate or bachelor’s degree will pay the equivalent of $220, including technology fees, per quarterly credit hour, which is a discount of approximately 45 percent. The total cost to graduation for a bachelor’s degree would be $39,600, compared to a total cost to degree of $80,088 (including room and board) for Indiana residents at Purdue’s West Lafayette campus.

    The reason there are two boards of trustees involved – for NewU and for Kaplan U – is that the deal still must be approved by state and federal regulators and by NewU’s accreditor HLC. (more…)

  • Whither Moodle?

    Whither Moodle?

    On e-Literate and even more so with our LMS market analysis service, we have called out many times the broad dominance of Moodle in terms of active installations worldwide. In every region outside of North America (US and Canada), Moodle has largest market share by far, and it is second place in North America.

    But the trajectory of Moodle new implementations (higher education degree-granting institutions moving from another LMS to Moodle as the primary LMS) is striking, especially in the US and Canada as seen below, with Moodle highlighted (all data is from our partner LISTedTECH). (Update: Image link fixed – wasn’t showing in some areas)

    (more…)

  • Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education (BNED) announced today that they have a deal with Unizin to provide predictive analytics services through the LoudSight platform to the consortium’s member universities. As covered by Inside Higher Ed:

    BNED, as the company now likes to be called, operates nearly 1,500 bookstores, but has in recent years expanded beyond course materials. In March 2016, it acquired the software start-up LoudCloud, and it is through that company that BNED now will score a group of 22 potential new clients (or, in the cases where it already runs campus bookstores, form tighter connections with existing ones) that includes Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University and the State University System of Florida, among others.

    The deal represents a new product focus for BNED’s LoudCloud – predictive analytics – and a new financial model for Unizin. (more…)

  • State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition

    State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition

    This is the ninth year I have shared the LMS market share graphic, commonly known as the squid graphic, for US and Canadian higher education. The original idea remains – to give a picture of the LMS market in one page, highlighting the story of the market over time. The key to the graphic is that the width of each band represents the percentage of institutions using a particular LMS as its primary system.

    Last year we made a big shift based on our LMS market analysis service – we are working with LISTedTECH to provide market data and visualizations. This data source provides historical and current measures of institutional adoptions, allowing new insights into how the market has worked and current trends. Our spring report for subscribers will be released this month. Data for 2017 goes through April 1 of this year.

    (more…)

  • Movement of Canvas LMS to Global Markets

    Movement of Canvas LMS to Global Markets

    We’re coming up on our one-year anniversary of the e-Literate Big Picture: LMS market analysis service and getting our Spring 2017 report ready. One of the things that I love about working with LISTedTECH as our partners for this service is that their data goes beyond a snapshot in time and well beyond the North American market. Not to mention their skills with visualization of data.

    During a session today at the ASU/GSV Summit, Instructure CEO Josh Coates described how the company tests out new ideas – making bets and getting rapid feedback – and one example used was seeing if they could sell the Canvas LMS into a new country, Spain in this case. (more…)

  • Do For-profit Institutions Converting to Non-profit Affect Distance Education Enrollment Numbers?

    Do For-profit Institutions Converting to Non-profit Affect Distance Education Enrollment Numbers?

    In a comment to my post on the new Digital Learning Compass report covering distance education enrollment trends for US higher education, Richard Garrett, Chief Research Officer at Eduventures and Director at The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, asked an interesting question.

    I’d welcome your view on a related issue I’ve been wrestling with, namely how to treat for-profit institutions with significant numbers of online students that are now nonprofit. A number made such a conversion in the fall 2012-15 period, and more are to come (e.g. the EDMC and Kaplan announcements). In your study, did you use institutional control for the year concerned or continue to treat former for-profits as such? If the former, then I think it is worth pointing out that some of the private nonprofit growth, and for-profit decline, is due to control conversion.

    With all of the news around for-profit changes, include Corinthian Colleges, ITT, Kaplan University, DeVry rebranding, I thought it would be worth addressing this question in a new post instead of just in the comments as I suspect others may have the same question.

    tl;dr – There has been no material effect of these institutional control changes for the periods covered in the DL Compass report (Fall 2012 through Fall 2015). (more…)