e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • LoudCloud Systems and FASTRAK: A non walled-garden approach to CBE

    As competency-based education (CBE) becomes more and more important to US higher education, it would be worth exploring the learning platforms in use. While there are cases of institutions using their traditional LMS to support a CBE program, there is a new market developing specifically around learning platforms that are designed specifically for self-paced, fully-online, competency-framework based approaches.

    Recently I saw a demo of the new CBE platform from LoudCloud Systems, a company whose traditional LMS I have covered a few years ago. The company is somewhat confusing to me – I had expected a far larger market impact from them based on their product design than what has happened in reality. LoudCloud has recently entered the CBE market, not by adding features to their core LMS but by creating a new product called FASTRAK. Like Instructure with their creation of a new LMS for a different market (corporate learning), LoudCloud determined that CBE called for a new design and that the company can handle two platforms for two mostly distinct markets. In the case of Bridge and FASTRAK, I believe the creation of a new learning platform took approximately one year (thanks a lot, Amazon). LoudCloud did leverage several of the traditional LMS tools such as rubrics, discussion forums and their LoudBook interactive eReader.

    As was the case for the description of the Helix CBE-based learning platform and the description of FlatWorld’s learning platform, my interest here is not merely to review one company’s products, but rather to illustrate aspects of the growing CBE movement using the demo.

    LoudCloud’s premier CBE partner is the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center, a part of the College of Education that provides professional development for Florida’s 55,000 early learning teachers. They have or expect to have more than a dozen pilot programs for CBE in place during the first half of 2015. (more…)

  • e-Literate TV Preview: Essex County College and changing role of faculty

    As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Michael and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

    In this video preview (about 4:18 in duration), we hear from two faculty members who have first-hand experience in using a personalized learning approach as well as a traditional approach to remedial math. We also hear from students on what they are learning about learning. In our case studies so far, the real faculty issue is not that software is being designed to replace faculty, but rather that successful implementation of personalized learning necessarily changes the role of faculty. One of our goals with e-Literate TV is to allow faculty, staff and students to describe direct experiences in their own words. Take a look.

    Stay tuned for the full episodes to be released on the In The Telling platform ((ITT is our partner in developing this series, providing video production as well as the platform.)). You can follow me (@PhilOnEdTech), Michael (@mfeldstein67), or e-Literate TV (@eLiterateTV) to stay up to date. You can also follow the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. We will also announce the release here on e-Literate.

  • First View of Bridge: The new corporate LMS from Instructure

    Last week I covered the announcement from Instructure that they had raised another $40 million in venture funding and were expanding into the corporate learning market. Today I was able to see a demo of their new corporate LMS, Bridge. While Instructure has very deliberately designed a separate product from Canvas, their education-focused LMS, you can see the same philosophy of market strategy and product design embedded in the new system. In a nutshell, Bridge is designed to a simple, intuitive platform that moves control of the learning design away from central HR or IT control and closer to the end user.

    While our primary focus at e-Literate is on higher ed and even some K-12 learning, the development of professional development and corporate training markets are becoming more important even in the higher ed context. At the least, this is important for those who are tracking Instructure and how their company plans might affect the future of education platforms.

    The core message of Instructure regarding Bridge – just as with Canvas – is that it is focused on ease-of-use whereas the entrenched competition has fallen prey to feature bloat based on the edge cases. Despite this claim and despite Instructure’s track record with Canvas, what does this mean? I’m pretty sure every vendor out there claims ease-of-use whether or not there are elegant or terrible designs ((Although I would love to see the honest ad: “With a horrible, bloated user interface based on your 300-item RFP checklist!”)).

    Based on the demo, Bridge appears to define ease-of-use in three distinct areas – streamlined, clutter-free interface for learners, simple tools for content creation by business units, and simple tools for managing learners and content. (more…)

  • ITC #eLearning2015 Keynote Video and Material

    This past week I had the opportunity to provide the keynote at the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) eLearning2015 conference in Las Vegas. ITC is a great group that provides leadership and professional development to faculty and staff in community and junior colleges in online education, and increasingly in hybrid course models. To save time on individual sharing, I have included most of the material below.

    Here is the MediaSite recording of the keynote:

    And here are the slides in SlideShare: (more…)

  • What TechCrunch Got Wrong (and Right) About Instructure Entering Corporate Learning Market

    After yesterday’s “sources say” report from TechCrunch about Instructure – maker of the Canvas LMS – raising a new round of financing and entering the corporate LMS space, Instructure changed plans and made their official announcement to today. The funding is to both expand the Canvas team and to establish the new corporate LMS team. I’m not a fan of media attempts to get a scoop based purely on rumors, and in this case TechCrunch got a few items wrong that are worth correcting.

    • Instructure raised $40 million in new financing (series E), not “between $50 to $70 million”. TechCrunch did hedge their bets with “low end of the range at over $40 million”.
    • The primary competition in the corporate LMS space is Saba, SumTotal, Skillsoft, Cornerstone – and not Blackboard.
    • The Canvas LMS was launched in 2010, not 2011. (OK, I’ll give them this one, as even Instructure seems to use the 2011 date).

    TechCrunch did get the overall story of fund-raising and new corporate product right, but these details matter.

    Instructure’s new product for the corporate learning market is called Bridge, with its web site here. This is an entirely new product, although it does share a similar product architecture as Canvas, the LMS designed for the education market (including being based on Ruby on Rails). Unlike Canvas, Bridge was designed mobile-first, with all mobile capabilities embedded in the product and not as separate applications. In an interview with Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, he described their motivation for this new product.

    We like the idea of building software that helps people get smarter. Post education there is a void, with bad corporate software.

    (more…)

  • NGDLE: The quest to eat your cake and have it too

    And I’m going old school and sticking to the previous saying.

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    Today I’m participating in the EDUCAUSE meeting on Next Generation Digital Learning Environments, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ((Disclosure: Our upcoming e-Literate TV series has also received a grant from the Gates Foundation.)). From the invitation:

    The purpose of the panel is to identify potential investment strategies that are likely to encourage and hasten the arrival of “next-generation digital learning environments,” online learning environments that take us beyond the LMS to fully support the needs of today’s students and instructors. [snip]

    It is clear that to meet the needs of higher education and today’s learner, the NGDLE must support a much wider range of functionality than today’s LMS, including different instructional modes, alternative credit models, personalized learning, robust data and content exchange, real-time and iterative assessment, the social web, and contemporary software design and usability practices. The policy and cultural context at our colleges and universities must also adapt to a world in which all learning has a digital component.

    As I’m making an ill-timed trip from sunny California to snow-ravaged DC for a reduced-attendance meeting, I should at least lay down some of my thoughts on the subject in writing ((Now that I’ve gone down for breakfast, the 2-inch snowfall would be somewhat embarrassing if not for the city being shut down.)).

    There is potential confusion of language here by implying NGDLE as an environment to replace today’s LMS. Are we talking about new, monolithic systems that replace today’s LMS but also have a range of functionality to support new needs, or are we talking about an environment that allows reasonably seamless integration and navigation between multiple systems? Put another way, investing in what?

    To get at that question we should consider the current LMS market. (more…)

  • California Community College OEI Selects LMS Vendor

    The Online Education Initiative (OEI) for California’s Community College System has just announced its vendor selection for a Common Course Management System (CCMS) ((Note that this is an Intent to Award, not yet a contract.)). For various reasons I cannot provide any commentary on this process, so I would prefer to simply direct people to the OEI blog site. Update: To answer some questions, the reason I cannot comment is that CCC is a MindWires client, and I facilitated the meetings. Based on this relationship we have a non-disclosure agreement with OEI.

    Here is the full announcement.

    The California Community Colleges (CCC) Online Education Initiative (OEI) announced its intent to award Instructure Inc. the contract to provide an online course management system and related services to community colleges statewide.

    Support for Instructure’s Canvas system was nearly unanimous among the OEI’s Common Course Management System (CCMS) Committee members, with overwhelming support from student participants, officials said. Canvas is a course management platform that is currently being used by more than 1,000 colleges, universities and school districts across the country.

    “Both the students and faculty members involved believed that students would be most successful using the Canvas system,” said OEI Statewide Program Director Steve Klein. “The student success element was a consistent focus throughout.”

    The announcement includes some information on the process as well. (more…)