e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Business & Economics

The “Business & Economics” category covers the business aspects of ed tech, including the financial health and business models of individual companies, economic aspects of selling in education that shape the available offerings, and coverage of markets and investment.

  • Schoology Layoffs: Focusing on smaller higher ed opportunities

    Schoology Layoffs: Focusing on smaller higher ed opportunities

    We’ve noticed and had several people ask us about corporate changes at Schoology, the LMS vendor. More specifically, the questions have been based on whether they are laying off staff, and what that means for the higher ed LMS market. Short answers – yes to the layoffs, and the company will be more selective on which higher ed opportunities to pursue.

    Through phone and email interviews, I asked CEO Jeremy Friedman to respond to these questions.

    As you and I have talked about, operational efficiency is a strategic objective for Schoology in 2017. As we built our plan for the year we saw opportunities to focus our efforts and operate at a higher level. This meant that we decided to reduce our headcount by a little over 10%, primarily across sales and marketing. To be clear, we reduced how much we are going to spend in Sales and Marketing, and we increased how much we are going to spend in Research & Development and Customer Success. The net impact is a more efficient company that can invest more in product innovation and our customers.

    (more…)

  • Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    For those following the Piazza privacy issues, we have a new update where the company has made three significant changes in their response to privacy concerns from several universities. They are now using true opt-in for their Careers product, they have stopped the practice of using university logos without permission, and they are now offering an easier process to enter into no-cost agreements. For those who have not followed, read here here and here for background. And remember that this case of Piazza’s usage of student data can be seen as a case study on third-party learning apps as we move closer to the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment / LMS as Hub concept.

    Opt-In vs Opt-Out

    In my original post, one of the key issues I called out was that Piazza did not offer with their Q&A platform a true opt-in method for students to choose to allow their personal data to be shared with recruiters through the Careers product.

    What does that opt-in look like in practice? Faculty assign usage of the platform, and during setup students see a pre-checked box labeled “Sign me up” for opting into the Careers service. (more…)

  • Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state of California $39 million due to an audit of distance education courses.

    City College of San Francisco, struggling for every dollar it can muster, must repay the state nearly $39 million because it can’t prove that instructors taught thousands of students in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014, an audit revealed.

    City College has been unable to verify teaching about 16,000 students in 587 online courses — from Accent Improvement to Cardiorespiratory Emergencies — over the three-year period, according to the state-commissioned audit that ended in September.

    It took a little bit of digging during a conference call (shh, don’t tell the hosts), but it looks like the issue was that the vast majority of faculty teaching online or hybrid courses chose to not use the centralized Moodle LMS system despite district policy that the LMS is the official record of student and faculty interaction.  (more…)

  • The Remarkable Transformation at UF Online

    The University of Florida, based on a plan created by the state legislature, started UF Online in 2013. The original business plan was a case study in optimistic enrollment planning and the road-to-riches through online education. From program inception, UF Online was forecast to grow to a headcount of 24,000 students within 10 years, 43% of whom would be out-of-state high-tuition students, generating $76 million in annual revenue and $14 million of “profit”. Then reality hit. The first executive director quit, enrollment reality did not match plans, they got rid of their Online Program Management partner (Pearson), and they hired a new executive director with no higher education management experience. In my May 2015 coverage, I concluded:

    UF Online seems to be institutionally-focused rather than student-focused, and the initiative is shaping up to be a case study in hubris. Without major changes in how the program is managed, including the main campus input into decisions, UF Online risks becoming the new poster child of online education failures. I honestly hope they succeed, but the current outlook is not encouraging.

    In a remarkable transformation in the past year originally described at Inside Higher Ed, UF Online appears to have made “major changes to how the program is managed” and is now focusing on students and reality. (more…)

  • Analytics Literacy is a Major Limiter of Ed Tech Growth

    Whatever else you think of the election, it has been the mother of all teachable moments for many of us. It has raised questions about what we thought we knew about our democracy, our neighbors, our media…and apparently learning analytics. The shock of the polls being “wrong” has raised a lot of questions about how much we can really trust data analytics. Audrey Watters has written the most fleshed out critique that I’ve seen so far. But Dave Cormier tweeted about it as well. And I have had several private conversations along these lines. They all raise the question of whether we put too much faith in numerical analysis in general and complex learning analytics in particular. That is an excellent question. But in doing so, some of these arguments position analytics in opposition to narratives. That part is not right. Analytics are narratives. They are stories that we tell, or that machines tell, in order to make meaning out of data points. The problem is that most of us aren’t especially literate in this kind of narrative and don’t know how to critique it well.

    This is going to be a wide-ranging post that goes a little lit crit at times and dives into an eclectic collection of topics from election polling to the history of medicine. But even the most pragmatic, b-school-minded entrepreneur or VC may find some value here. Because what I’m ultimately talking about is a fundamental limiter on the future growth of the ed tech industry. The value of learning analytics, and therefore the market for them, will be limited by the data and statistical literacy of those who adopt it. The companies that are focused on developing fancier algorithms are solving the wrong problem—at least for now. These tools will have limited adoption until they are put into the hands of educators who understand their uses and limitations. And we have a long way to go in that department.

    (more…)

  • Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy

    Based on Thursday’s blog post “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, Piazza’s CEO Pooja Sankar invited me to meet at their offices Friday afternoon. Given the nature of Thursday’s post, I offered to publish any statement that Piazza had in response here at e-Literate, an offer they accepted. I will defer further analysis for a few days.  – PH

    Update: In the process of making copy-editing changes, we accidentally temporarily removed links accessibility and FERPA compliance documentations. They have been restored to the current draft.

    Sorry about that.

    Statement From Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar

    We at Piazza take our obligations to our community of students, professors, and institutions of higher education very seriously. We cherish and safeguard the privacy of our community. But we made a mistake by not engaging and responding to a way befitting of the trust placed in us. Many of our 1500 Universities reached out quite reasonably to enter into legal agreements for the free service. But as a lean, sub-30 person company without in-house legal, we were overwhelmed with all the (expensive) requests for one-off contracts (for a free Q&A service). We handled it poorly. This unfortunately gave people the impression that we were arrogant. You deserve better. We can do better. (more…)

  • Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data

    Update– Please see follow-on posts addressing changes since this post:

    Piazza is a collaborative question-and-answer platform that is “completely free” and can easily integrate into an institutional LMS, or in some cases replace the LMS. In our interviews for e-Literate TV, we have heard several glowing reviews about student engagement increasing thanks to the nature of the collaborative discussions. But in a case study of the aphorism that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”, there are some significant privacy concerns around student data being sold, and several universities are pushing back.

    The source of the dispute is not one of a vendor getting caught selling or sharing data behind the scenes, however. Piazza is quite open about their ongoing usage of student data to generate revenue – in their privacy policy, in their click-through terms of service, and throughout their web site. The source of the dispute is Piazza’s lenient interpretation of privacy concerns and their apparent unwillingness to comply with institutional policies or guidance on student data privacy. (more…)