Last week I shared data tables for online education at US public 4-year institutions, with additional data for Florida. Now that I’m getting the process reasonably efficient for analyzing this data, there is some room for requests (hmm, slippery slope here). https://twitter.com/econproph/status/432308481786253313 Since Jim teaches in Michigan, let’s review the 2-year data with additional data […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. […]