e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • Our LMS Subscription is Available Today

    Today we are pleased to announce that our LMS subscription service is available for purchase. As promised, we have kept the promotion on the blog to a minimum, providing details instead to people who specifically sign up for the mailing list. But since today is the big unveiling, it seems appropriate to tell you all a little bit about it and what it means for where we are going with the blog and our work.

    The subscription is called “e-Literate Big Picture: LMS.” As you might guess from the title, there will be other “e-Literate Big Picture” subscriptions. Each of these will provide regular updates and in-depth analysis that go beyond the free analysis that we will continue to provide here on the blog, focused particularly on helping campuses make good decisions about how to evaluate, acquire, implement, and support educational technology in ways that will have the most positive impact for students and faculty. They will extend the work of the blog with analysis that is more actionable.

    In the case of this first subscription, we have been able to augment our analysis of the LMS  market with data and analytics support from our partner LISTedTECH. Their database contains information on LMS selections of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, plus thousands of more worldwide. The database goes well beyond who is using which LMS today, as it also contains information on LMS migrations (decommission, implementations, pilots, etc) over the last 15 years. This information has given us an unprecedented chance to both test hypotheses we’ve had about the LMS market as well as form new ones. The bottom line is that we have gained insights into how the LMS market is changing that we believe are new. (more…)

  • The First e-Literate Subscription Product

    Not too long ago, Phil and I wrote a post about our long, slow process of realization that our blogging at e-Literate and our consulting at MindWires are not two mostly unrelated things but really two halves of a whole. And we teased the idea that these two worlds would be coming together soon.

    Today we’re ready to pull back the curtain a little bit on what we’ve been working on for the short term and offer some hints about what we’re thinking about for the medium term. We have some fairly audacious ambitions for the long term, but we don’t expect to get there overnight. In fact, we are going to start with a humble and somewhat unlikely (but hopefully useful) first paid subscription offering, which we will be making available in just a couple of weeks under the e-Literate brand. It will provide information and analysis above and beyond our continuing free content here on the blog (to which we remain strongly committed).

    We’re going to be releasing an LMS market dynamics report, in partnership with LISTedTECH. We’d like to explain why we’re starting there, what we hope the report will accomplish, and where we will go from there.

    (more…)

  • Another Email Subscription Update

    Those of you subscribed to the site by email may have noticed that you didn’t get anything in the last 24 hours. (Or maybe you didn’t notice, since the email never came.) We are aware of the problem. The new system sends a message once a day and is next scheduled to send an email digest every morning at 4 AM Eastern Time. For whatever reason, it did not engage this morning, but we believe that it is working correctly now. You should get something in your inbox that includes this post tomorrow morning. Obviously, if you are reading this by email, then all is well.

    Thanks for your patience as we work out the kinks in the new system.

  • Mail Subscription Change

    For those of you who subscribe to e-Literate by email, be aware that we’re switching over to a new system for handling emails today. Among other things, we’ve had complaints that a few people had trouble unsubscribing.

    Which is bad.

    The new plugin, Mailchimp, will hopefully solve this problem while enabling us to do some new things we’ve been thinking about as well. (More on that soon.)

    We will switch over to the new plugin shortly after I post this message and will be publishing one or two new posts in the next 24 hours. So if you don’t receive any emails by this time tomorrow, or if you have any other email-related problems, then please let us know.

  • Some Changes at e-Literate and MindWires

    Periodically, we write “full disclosure” posts describing our work and how it relates to our blogging, mostly so that readers can judge any conflict of interests we may have. They are usually not particularly fun or interesting posts, but we feel they are important nevertheless.

    This time is a little different. We have been thinking hard about the relationship between the blog and our paid work. After listening to a lot of readers and customers, we have some new ideas about how we can have the most impact—some of which we can talk about today, some of which we can talk about soon, and some of which we will talk about down the road.

    (more…)

  • Three Views of Top 10 e-Literate Posts in 2015

    It’s the year end, and I have writer’s block. Like many people, I would much prefer to play with numbers than get work done. Instead of just sharing the Top 10 or Top 20 blog posts in terms of 2015 page views, however, I thought it would be interesting to take three different views this time.

    Top 10 most-viewed blog posts on e-Literate for 2015

    This one is straightforward and ranked by page views, but note that several posts from prior years continue to get a lot of views.

    1. How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? (2015)
    2. What is a Learning Platform? (2012)
    3. A response to USA Today article on Flipped Classroom research (2013)
    4. Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction (2015)
    5. First View of Bridge: The new corporate LMS from Instructure (2015)
    6. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2014 Edition (2014)
    7. Why Google Classroom won’t affect institutional LMS market … yet (2014)
    8. Blackboard Ultra and Other Product and Company Updates (2015)
    9. No Discernible Growth in US Higher Ed Online Learning (2015)
    10. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2015 Edition (2015)

    Top 10 most-mentioned blog posts in social media

    (more…)

  • Live Stream for Wednesday’s OpenEd Keynote

    Phil and I will be giving a joint keynote to the OpenEd conference the day after tomorrow—Wednesday, 11/18—at 8:30 AM Pacific Standard Time. You can watch the live stream here. If you miss it live, don’t worry. The video will be available afterward at the same URL. For a modest license fee, all rights reserved.

    Kidding about that last part.