e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • New look at LMS data for US small colleges

    Last fall I mentioned two new non-survey data sources available to track LMS adoption within higher ed. While surveys for subjective, attitudinal information still make sense, surveys of hard data are losing their value over time. Analyses of automatically collected system data place less of a burden on the organizations providing the information, and these analyses also allow a more agile approach to refining the data collection and viewing from different angles. Today Edutechnica released a new report on LMS adoption that demonstrates these benefits.

    When we provided our initial analysis of LMS usage in fall of 2013, one point of feedback that we heard loud and clear is that because our data only included institutions with greater than 2000 enrollments, we excluded a fair number of community colleges, career colleges, and liberal arts colleges. To the credit of those who provided this feedback, they were absolutely correct. Three-quarters of all recognized higher education institutions in the United States have fewer than 2500 FTE – a critical demographic as the majority of universities in the US are of this size or smaller. To more fairly represent LMS usage we needed to include data on smaller schools.

    We are now excited to be able to provide analysis of a data set for institutions with greater than 1000 students.

    The team presents the raw data for schools above 1,000 FTE, calling out some of the differences from their earlier report. But one key view they provided is looking at institutional LMS adoption per school enrollment size.

    Seeing Moodle’s increased usage prompted us to investigate Moodle further. An interesting thing happens below 2500 FTE; Moodle actually exceeds Blackboard’s market  share.  Only after this point do the demographic segments diverge. (more…)

  • Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education

    At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.

    Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”

    “Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

    His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.

    “The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

    I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.

    https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064

    (more…)

  • The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry

    For a few years starting in 2009, it seemed one of the best ways to raise VC funds or corporate internal investment was to say “we can beat Blackboard with a new cloud-based platform”. Witness Coursekit / Lore, Instructure / Canvas, OpenClass, LoudCloud Systems, Helix, and even more recently MOOC platforms. There were many articles written as these new systems entered the market, but what if we look back and ask whether the LMS market has actually changed recently? The picture that emerges is one of surprising resiliency by the established LMS providers.

    In fact, I would argue that in the past eight years (at least in North America) the only new system that has fully established itself in the LMS market is Canvas. Note that I have combined WebCT and ANGEL within the Blackboard umbrella, but even these systems established themselves more than a decade ago.

    (more…)

  • Education M&A Activity in 2013: Still growing, but changing

    Like it or not, education is an industry, and much of the change we see affecting higher ed and K-12 institutions is driven by investment from the private sector. It can be useful to get a high-level view of the trends in private investments to help understand where private companies (edtech vendors, publishers, for-profit institutions, etc) are likely to move in the future.

    According to a new year-end report from Berkerey Noyes, a US-based investment banker, merger and acquisition activity in the education industry continued to grow in 2013, with the 9 of the 10 largest deals occurring outside of the US. As summarized at Education Week:

    A number of recent reports have shown or predicted a strong and growing demand for various educational products and services in markets such as Latin America, and the new, year-end report on transactions published by Berkery Noyes would seem to reinforce that portrait.

    “The big education players are acquiring to help manage the transition from print to digital,” Peter Yoon, managing director of Berkery Noyes’ education group, said in an interview. He said they’re also moving to “strengthen their presence in emerging markets.”

    The most active acquirer was Pearson PLC, with six deals that included the “acquisition of Grupo Multi Holding, an English language training company headquartered in Brazil, for $829 million”.

    In total there were 295 transactions for a total of $10.2 billion in value, which represented year-over-year growth of 8 and 27% respectively.

    Summary

    Beyond the international growth, there are two other items that jumped out at me – the shift towards strategic buyers and the strong growth in professional training.

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  • Response from Babson Survey author on differences with IPEDS

    I have written a series of posts on the new IPEDS data, including two that showed how this data seems to be quite different from the pervasive Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) data (formerly known as the Sloan Survey). In particular, there were two findings, one on the number of students taking online courses:

    And no, there aren’t 7.1 million [from Babson] US higher ed students taking at least one online course. There are closer to 5.5 million [from IPEDS] as of Fall 2012.

    and one on the number of institutions offering online education:

    The big difference that should be obvious is that the Babson data shows less than half the number of institutions with no online offerings than the IPEDS data – 15% compared to 31%.

    Who has an online offering?

    I have been in contact with Jeff Seaman, one of the two authors of the BSRG reports, to get his analysis on the differences, including sharing my spreadsheets used for analysis of the two data sets. Jeff has graciously reviewed the data and provided the following analysis of why BSRG data is so different from IPEDS data.

    (more…)

  • Update: Blackboard and Washington Post change the employee count

    Well that was a major change. As I noted yesterday, Blackboard described its reorganization efforts to the Washington Post for its Saturday profile of the company and CEO Jay Bhatt.

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 2,200 employees to date.

    This was interesting to me, since in Fall 2012 Blackboard gave information to both the Washington Business Journal and the Washington Post stating that the company had 3,000 employees. I noted this in my post yesterday:

    That is a significant change, if these stories are accurate, going from 3,000 employees to 2,200 in less than 18 months …

    The Washington Post just issued a correction to their story today that changes the numbers significantly:

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 3,000 employees to date.

    There is almost no explanation for the change in numbers, other than the following:

    An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Adrenna, the learning management platform. It also incorrectly stated how many people are employed at Blackboard. This version has been corrected.

    (more…)

  • Coursera blocked in Iran due to human grading and discussion forums?

    Update: I just received confirmation from a Coursera spokesperson that the description of facts about Coursera’s block of student access in this and my previous blog post is accurate. They cannot comment on the rest of the professor’s statement nor on Udacity and edX.

    Yesterday I wrote about Coursera having to block access to its courses from students in Iran, Syria, Cuba and Sudan. Kris Olds covered this subject in more detail this morning as did Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed. The nub of the issue is that the US government (the State Department I believe) has declared MOOCs as educational services rather than information or informational materials, and thus the courses are subject to US embargoes of the four countries in question.

    According to IHE, Udacity “has not received official word about enrolling students in countries subject to economic sanctions”, and EdX has a license to operate in Iran, Syria and Cuba. So the issue is mostly with Coursera, although not by their decision.

    If a recent post from a Coursera instructor is accurate, we may now know what triggered the classification of MOOCs as a a service subject to sanctions. I was notified by a trusted reader that Ebrahim Afsah from the University of Copenhagen (yes, the same one from the story about abusive discussion forum posts) send a message this afternoon to all students in his MOOC “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” (registration required). He quotes a message from Coursera to MOOC instructors that includes the new information [emphasis added].

    (more…)