David Bainbridge, CEO of UK-based Knowledgemotion, wrote a post on Saturday in TechCrunch titled “Edtech is the next fintech” calling out the huge, untapped potential of EdTech. Thanks to Alan Levine for sharing this one. Spoiler alert: But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunities edtech promises the world’s largest content providers, […]
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.
Instructurecon 2016: Why This Company is Still Formidable (and Misunderstood)
When I talk to Instructure competitors or critics, I usually hear two complaints about them: They “open wash” or are “fauxpen.” They have no vision. Having attended Instructurecon 2016 a couple of weeks ago, my answer to the first complaint is that the critics don’t understand what Instructure and their customers mean by “openness.” In […]
MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong
New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up. Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently […]
Reprise: How Much Do Community College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks?
Last month the nonprofit advocacy group Achieving the Dream announced a new initiative to fund 38 community colleges who are willing to build entire programs with open educational resources. While this is a noble effort aimed at reducing financial barriers for students to get two-year degrees, the group perpetuated the same myth that has plagued higher education for years.
UC Davis, Sakai, and Open Source
Phil has been a busy boy, putting out two pieces about some Blackboard research that had gotten some negative responses and two more on a horrifically bad LMS outage for UC Davis and other universities using support vendor Scriba. Our main schtick here at e-Literate is to get beyond the headlines. We try to explain what is actually happening and why it is […]
Pop Quiz
Which CEO has recently said or done all of the following: Suggested to an audience of VCs and ed tech entrepreneurs at the GSV conference that the importance of big data in education has been overstated Told that same audience that the biggest gains from adaptive learning come when it is wrapped in good pedagogy […]
A Big Reason That Digital Textbooks Are Misunderstood
Chegg, which is in the midst of a dramatic change in their business model by moving from textbook rentals to digital student services, got slammed last week in the stock market. After reporting mixed results of better-than-expected earnings yet worse-than-expected revenues, their stock price lost 35% in one day (Feb 22). But this is not […]