e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Big Picture

The “Big Picture” category covers larger trends and topics that influence both the problems that technology can help address in education as well as the barriers to implementing high-quality technology-supported education. This includes research-based topics such as learning science and program effectiveness studies, philosophical discussions such as outcomes definitions, and macro-forces such as government policy, markets, and business models.

  • The Billion Dollar EdTech Platform Hole

    Actually, make those plural: billions, holes…

    In my last post I began to frame a multi-part discussion about the state of play of #edtech and how response to the global pandemic will result in a significant acceleration of what has been a relatively long and drawn out adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning. And, while it seems an obvious statement – in light of the extraordinary increase in, say, use of technology-enabled grocery delivery – my point is that many of the specific objections and barriers that persisted are moot in the face of the alternative (insolvency of the institution). As those issues are reconciled, it is clear that a key driver is the (re?)realization that organizing around the needs of learners is job one.

    Let’s start with a quick historical take on the various players in the education ecosystem and their assertions about how technology, platforms and data would transform the education landscape. I will speak in broad brush generalities and to protect the innocent and guilty I will not use names of companies, institutions or individuals.

    Some quick, level-setting definitions for purposes of this post (obviously leaving some categories out at this point of the series):

    Publishers – large and small purveyors of products including textbooks and online courseware systems that are based on a specific author’s (or team of authors’) content, pedagogy and reputation.

    Institutions – including higher education state systems, for-profits and consortia

    LMS providers – commercial and not-for-profit providers of learning management systems (LMS) / virtual learning environments (VLEs) and course management systems (CMS)

    Point Solution providers – defined as offerings typically designed to solve on specific business problem. Due to this specialization and focus, point solutions are champions in their specific area of functionality.

    Going back more than twenty years, we saw the first portals and LMS companies enter the market. Most of the positioning related to efficiencies like “get out of line and get on line” – for example, providing online access to registrar and bursar functions, anytime access to course materials like syllabi and handouts, and even rudimentary online office hours. For the institutions, the LMS promised to give students an anytime, anywhere access point to their courses and ideally for the institution to have another vehicle for collecting data. But it was hard work!  The teaching faculty were mostly left to their own devices to set these courses up; it took well more than a decade for 50% of US college courses to have an instance in their local LMS that presented much more than a file download of their syllabus.

    Publishers, on the other hand, used technology to create marketing splash and develop bundles intended to preserve the demand and value of the underlying print product. What started as CD-ROMS in the back of books became online access to supplemental course content and eventually to auto-graded online homework systems (a huge time-savings benefit to teaching faculty, especially in quantitative disciplines). As I mentioned in my last post, these systems typically comprise a fraction of the overall course experience. It is also evident that not all disciplines could be supported effectively by the auto-graded homework systems.

    Point solutions providers invariably entered the market chasing whatever cycle of buzzword-worthy solution development was in vogue: e-portfolios, lecture capture, e-books (42 at the peak, including “fit for learning” tablets), and adaptive learning platforms to name a few. As my definition indicates, these typically solved for a specific value proposition and many championed big ideas for the market broadly. Many failed along the way, a smaller number operate independently today as small companies, while a surprising number were acquired and bundled into the LMS and Publisher portfolios.

    Meanwhile, Institutions have been developing their own technologies as well. Partnering with other institutions to build LMS as well as creating point solutions like clickers, e-book readers and adaptive systems.

    And along the way, each of these organizations staked their claims to the nature of the market:

    • “the cable television network of education”
    • “the EBay of education”
    • “the consortium that will flip the textbook market on its head”
    • “the Amazon of education”

    You get the idea.

    It’s in that incomplete, but sufficient context, that I want to make my case. It takes millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, to build, maintain and evolve education technology platforms. Across the landscape there are dozens and dozens of organizations that have made investments at that order of magnitude. In some instances, organizations built and acquired more than one. That adds up to billions of dollars.

    And yet, the learner journey and experience remains very disjointed in today’s reality. In the spirit of academic freedom, an overwhelming majority of individual teaching faculty curate the materials and tools for their courses. And since it is the very rare case for a single provider to deliver an end-to-end experience – it is rather common for students to be required to navigate multiple, disparate systems, jump through multiple authentication sequences, and experience jarring differences in user experience and content fidelity. Beyond the challenges of the interactive experience, this form of curation can also complicate topics like affordability and equity of access for diverse student audiences.

    In the background, industry technology interoperability standards have evolved tremendously but are implemented in asymmetrical, unpredictable and sometimes proprietary ways. The use of instructional designers by institutions is growing, but there are still only 10,000 or so individual practitioners or roughly 1 per 100 teaching faculty members. These and other efforts can help, but are really band-aids covering bigger issues.

    Billions of dollars spent to develop products that are still hard to use because of massive market inefficiencies, competitive dynamics and other challenges in the broader education ecosystem.

    And here we are, the great acceleration. Yes, adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning is and will accelerate further. But the question is how higher education institutions and the companies that serve them will react to preserve (or not) academic freedom. Certainly, there is a bi-furcation within the market and even within institutions for more top-down course design and development – but a significant percentage of the overall enrolments are based in institutions with far more complex academic freedom cultures and governance models.

    I think this bi-furcation will widen. More and more courses will be built to “scale” with super clean instructional design, careful consideration of student engagement models, insightful use of data to drive outcomes, and “hands on” training for instructors who will deliver using best practices, their own skills and experiences, but little academic freedom.

    On the other hand, institutions for which academic freedom is a key tenet in their institutional mission will strive to build the capacities necessary to preserve their brands and the uniqueness of their teaching culture, while delivering high quality, differentiated learner experiences in technology-enabled environments. For these institutions, two things will become paramount: 1) changes to tenure and promotion incentives and 2) providing the time and resources (including outsourced services) to help faculty develop great courses.

    And those are not the only big changes looming: those institutions will become far more demanding of the companies seeking to provide them with content, technologies and services to ensure those offerings are not locked into proprietary platforms and business models. As they don’t say in politics, it’s about the learner experience, stupid!

    Next Up: The Netflix of Education, part ad nauseum

  • The ASU-hosted REMOTE Summit Has 22K+ Registrants—and no Press Coverage

    Update: As of the morning of July 13th, the first day of the summit has 40,294 registrants.

    As I have written before, the ASU-hosted REMOTE summit promises to be one of the biggest and most important events in this summer of COVID. It demonstrates what a proportionate, #ResilienceNetwork-style response should be. As of last Wednesday, the summit had over 22,000 registrants.

    Twenty-two thousand registrants. As of last Wednesday.

    There will be 100 speakers, the vast majority of whom are expert practitioners giving practical advice about teaching in the fall. The standard talk is 15 minutes long followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. In other words, talks are just long enough to provide one or two pieces of practical advice and answer questions about how to apply. There is no room for fluff. The summit agenda is rich, diverse, and practically focused. There will also be a track for open-ended coaching, spaces for networking, and more.

    And yet, try to find an article about it in the higher ed press.

    Go ahead. I’ll wait.

    I tried half a dozen different ways of searching and basically came up with nothing. The Chronicle and Times Higher Education (THE) are both listed as “Media Partners.” There was one article in THE that was too early to have anything of substance and was mostly an interview with Michael Crow. The summit didn’t even have a name when the article ran. It won’t show up in searches, and if you read the article, you could easily miss that there even was a summit. When I search the Chronicle for coverage, I find nothing. Nada. Zip. Same for Inside Higher Ed (IHE), (though IHE has some sort of partnership with THE, so maybe they figure they have it covered that way).

    You can find tons and tons of articles, surveys, and opinion pieces in these publications about how universities are not prepared for the fall. And yet, here is an event of epic scale which is designed to help universities prepare for the fall, and they can’t run an article about it? Not one? Given what all the survey results and hand-wringing quotes in the reporting and anxiety-riddled opinion pieces, doesn’t it seem logical that their readers might like to know about a free event that could help in advance of that event?

    There will likely be some after-the-fact coverage. I suppose that’s better than nothing since the talks will be available on video. But there were, as of last Wednesday, 78,000 open seats still available for the conference. Instead of publishing the 397th survey about how anxious everybody is, why not write about a massive, unprecedented effort to do something about it?

    The higher education press has always struggled to figure out how to cover technology-enabled education. While there have been various experiments over the years, in the end, both The Chronicle and IHE settled on the main strategy of publishing specialized newsletters, essentially treating the topic like one more niche, along with topics like admissions and marketing. But technology-enabled education isn’t a sideshow now. It’s the show. It is time for these publications to fundamentally rethink their approaches to coverage.

  • Could Elon Musk Solve Education’s Rural Broadband Problem This Year?

    I know, I know. This is exactly the sort of clickbait headline that e-Literate normally eschews. But bear with me, please.

    Because my wife and I live in a rural area and are seriously thinking about going even more rural in our next phase of life, I have been researching rural broadband. I can learn to live with a long trip to the nearest real town, and I might even be able to learn to live with composting toilets. (Maybe.) But no broadband? No way.

    So I’ve been researching the various trends in rural broadband. The short answer is that they do not look good. The economic incentives are not strong for either cable or phone companies to extend their networks. Could that change with Federal subsidization? Sure, to a degree, but only so much. And laying new cable or putting up new cell towers takes time. There’s a thing called “fixed wireless internet,” but it’s limited by line-of-site connections, so if you live in the mountains, then you can probably forget about it. Traditional high-orbit satellite internet connections are limited by really horrible latency, pretty much ruling out living in the Zoom world many of us have been inhabiting lately. I don’t see any of the usual suspects solving this problem at any time soon.

    The next possibility is new low-orbit satellites. These are much, much closer to the ground than the internet/tv satellites of today, so that helps a lot with the latency problem. In fact, they may not be satellites at all. Google’s Alphabet parent company is looking at using balloons, while Facebook is researching high-flying drones.

    Many of these efforts are still glorified research projects. But Elon Musk’s Starlink effort, which is currently operated by his privately owned SpaceX company, appears to be much further along. SpaceX has been launching satellites in batches of about 60 at a time. They are scheduled for their tenth launch this week, bringing their total close to 600 satellites launched so far. To put that in perspective, Musk thinks the minimum number of satellites for a commercially viable service is between 800 and 1,000 (though the company has filed with the FCC for permission to eventually launch 30,000). The company claims that once the service is operational it will provide gigabit speeds—for comparison, that’s ten times faster than my quite satisfactory cable broadband connection—and latency that’s certainly low enough for videoconferencing and will eventually be low enough for high-end video gaming.

    Starlink claims it will be able to offer service to “Canada and the Northern United States” by “the end of 2020.” Obviously, even assuming that they meet their schedule, there’s a lot of ambiguity here. What does “Canada and Northern United States” mean? When exactly is “end of 2020”? The last article I linked to above claimed that the company will start accepting beta testers by the end of the summer.

    There are significant technical hurdles that the company will have to overcome. First, Starlink hopes to compete in a Federal funding auction for $16 billion to apply toward rural broadband access, but they need to demonstrate that they can provide service with latency under 100ms. The FCC has expressed serious doubts about whether a satellite service such as Starlink can achieve this benchmark (which is significantly less stringent than the 8ms latency that Musk claims the service will eventually be able to achieve). The due date for that proof point is July 15th, so we’ll know very soon whether Starlink can cross that hurdle. Second, the receiver boxes needed by consumers for this service are very sophisticated and therefore expensive. The initial cost to build them could be in the $1,000 range, and Musk has said his goal is to get the cost down to $300 by 2023. None of that tells us how much they will actually cost consumers. First, since this is a subsidiary of a privately owned company, Musk has latitude to subsidize the costs. Second, particularly with the COVID situation, there could be considerable additional funding coming from the Federal governments (particularly after the election in the US). Musk is initially focusing on rural areas that don’t get broadband service, so a combination of subsidies to his satellite service for those areas and the more traditional providers for low-income families in areas that get traditional service could be a reasonable approach.

    To sum up, while it is highly doubtful that SpaceX will provide a universal broadband solution for the US in time for the September start of the school year, it is not crazy to imagine that he could provide a technically practical solution over the course of the next school year that could be made affordable to rural students via government funding and subsidization by the company. Needless to say, this could be a game-changer for online learning. It’s just one piece of the equity problem, even if it’s universally available and affordable. But it would be a big step in the right direction. And I don’t see any other plausible solution candidates in the near term.

    We will be reaching a major proof point in about a week.

    SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket

  • e-Literate Live! Event on the ASU-hosted REMOTE Conference Next Week

    I’m excited to announce that the leader behind the ASU-hosted REMOTE Conference, current Entrepreneur in Residence and former McGraw-Hill Education CEO David Levin, will be joining me for an e-Literate LIVE session on Thursday, July 9th from 1:30 PM to 3 PM ET. As I’ve said before, the REMOTE conference is the first event I’ve seen that provides an example of the scale scope of the response to the crisis that we need in higher education. It’s also a good example of what a #ResilienceNetwork contribution could look like. The conference schedule is shaping up quite nicely; you can now get the flavor of it. As a reminder, this is a free virtual conference on July 13th and 14th for anyone in the world who wants to learn more practical and immediately applicable practices for teaching online more easily and effectively. I’m told that registrations have topped 10,000, but there’s still a lot of capacity for more attendees. please encourage anyone you know who could benefit from this event to come.

    In addition to being the person who thought of the idea for REMOTE and has been moving heaven and earth to make it happen, David is an interesting and lovely guy. I probably wouldn’t have started the Empirical Educator Project without his encouragement. So it should be a really good conversation. As will be the norm with e-Literate LIVE! events, we’re going to keep it loose, have some focused that actively includes you, and take your input for what you’d like to see happen as a follow-up to REMOTE.

    We’ll be doing this on the Run the World platform, which some of you were kind enough to kick the tires with me today. As I had previously mentioned, Run the World is a promising platform designed by former Instagram folks that is a hybrid of a web conference platform, a virtual conference platform, and a persistent social media platform. It’s unique. It’s also a little rough around the edges, having been rushed out early in the face of COVID. It’s probably fair to call it a public beta. But I love the vision for the platform and I also love the energy, enthusiasm, and quick wit of founder Xiaoyin Qi and her diverse group of colleagues. They’ve been evolving the platform quickly and taking input well. I’m going to stick with it and I invite you to stick with me on it. I believe the vision they have is an important one for meaningful group interaction and social engagement in the world that we live in today.

    Register here.

  • During #Covid19, Every Student is At-Risk

    One aspect of the current crisis that I’ve not seen a lot written about is retention. Oh, there’s plenty from a hand-wringing financial perspective. Will students take a gap year? If so, will they come back? Will they move to different institutions with better online learning offerings?

    What I haven’t seen a lot of yet is how to address the increased risk that traditionally successful students are more likely to drop out due to financial problems, the stress of working from home, other stresses in their lives, struggles to adapt to online education, and so on. If this list sounds familiar, it’s because students that we have thought of as “at risk” in the past—post-traditional students, including first-generation and older, working students—often face some or all of these challenges. But now, most or all students face them.

    Every student should be considered an at-risk student in the current environment.

    So we should be looking closely at the strategies that have been developed to address the needs of at-risk students and consider scaling them up to support every student. Particularly at higher end institutions whose populations have not been traditionally at-risk, it’s time to take a closer look at the supports you have in place for your non-traditional cohort and to learn from access-oriented colleges and universities that have been dealing with this problem at scale for a long time.

    I recently ran a Standard of Proof webinar with Tyton Partners, which recently released the latest iteration of their Driving Towards a Degree study of this strategy. There’s a lot that’s of interest in their work, including their methodology, which is quite clever. But today I want to highlight one of the major findings of the study, which is that colleges that collaborate across departmental lines on their retention initiatives achieve better retention. We all understand what the phrase “falling through the cracks” means, but Tyton has actually found a way to quantify how many more students fall through the cracks when college departments let those cracks form by not working together to create a seamless experience:

    Tyton’s findings on the impact of inter-departmental collaboration on retention

    [https://youtu.be/8At8Er_JXMY]

    Collaboration is particularly hard right now. Everybody is just trying to stay afloat. But that includes the students. Tyton was very careful not to generalize their pre-COVID study results to the current COVID situation—as they should be—but I would be money that next year’s results will be more dramatic than this year’s because the stresses on students are higher and there are more students under stress. Universities need to work harder than ever to knit their student support efforts into a coherent safety net for their students, and to anticipate many more students needing that support.

    Watch the whole webinar here.

  • #ResilienceNetwork Discussion Prompt Video

    As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to encourage conversation among groups about how we can build a #ResilienceNetwork together. The first such conversation will be next week at the Apereo Foundation virtual conference. I’ve created a discussion prompt video to kick off the conversation:

    #ResilienceNetwork Discussion Prompt

    [https://youtu.be/n8rY1PnH6o0]

    Here’s the lesson plan:

    • The foundation will be posting the video above on a discussion thread accessible to conference attendees. We will encourage folks to brainstorm asynchronously before we start.
    • I will facilitate a conversation with community leaders—in this case, Ben Maddox from NYU, Matthew Rascoff from Duke, and Aria Chernik from Duke OSPRI—about the input. We will also have synchronous breakout groups to discuss the prompt. These two pieces can be sequenced in either order, depending on the preference of the community.
    • We’ll wrap with a discussion with the leaders processing the input from the community and talking about the next steps to refine and prioritize the ideas and develop an action plan.

    The video and lesson plan are CC-BY licensed, as usual. You can use them without my prior permission. If you want to do this yourself with your group, feel free. If you produce interesting results, let me know. If you think that I can help, then ask me and I’ll help if I can.

  • ASU Launches Historic #ResilienceNetwork-relevant Virtual Conference

    So, the word is out in The Times of London that Arizona State University (ASU) is planning a massive, free virtual conference on July 13th and 14th to help faculty everywhere prepare for fall term under COVID. Speaking as a volunteer working on this effort, I can tell you with confidence that this event is going to be historic. There will be a large number of high-quality talks. The conference committee has—wisely—mostly eschewed the Big Think talks from Big Thinker speakers in favor of on-the-ground topics that will be immediately useful to faculty, delivered by people who have the hands-on experience. Faculty and other educators can dip in, find talks that speak to their aspirations or pain points, and dip out. The talks will be available afterward for people who can’t attend synchronously. I don’t think anybody can really predict what attendance will be like—ASU has wisely been setting modest expectations—but the venue has capacity for 100,000 attendees. I am asking you all to help fill this event to capacity.

    While the conference is not officially branded as a #resiliencenetwork event, it is very much in the spirit. The conference organizers are gathering up some of the best information and useful presentations from people who are responding to the crisis on the ground right now. Rather than linking out to a thousand sites on a web page, they are coordinating the production and distribution of the content so that it can reach the most faculty possible at the time when they are preparing to deal with the next wave. Notably, the conference is branded as “REMOTE: the connected faculty summit hosted by ASU.” Somebody at the university made the decision to downplay their brand in favor of highlighting the purpose of the event and the common cause across the sector.

    This is our first example of what a proportionate response could look like.

    Details on the web site are currently scant and there’s not a lot I can share yet because, frankly, the plane is being built while in flight. Speakers are still being confirmed. Connections with partner organizations are still being ironed out. Staff and volunteers are working frantically to stay on top of the work even as this the scale of the project has mushroomed. ASU will undoubtedly be releasing more details as they get finalized. I will keep you posted. For now, I’m telling you as somebody who has had the privilege of working with the folks who are making this happen: This is going to be a big, big deal.

    You can register here.