e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Curricular-Materials

This category includes digital curricular materials, including adaptive learning, assessments, OER, etc.

  • Good Enough vs. Better Enough: The Macmillan Example

    Good Enough vs. Better Enough: The Macmillan Example

    In my recent post on Cengage Unlimited, I made a brief mention of the battle shaping up in the curricular materials world between “good enough” and “better enough.” I argued that Cengage is coming down on the “good enough” side by emphasizing all-you-can-eat pricing.

    The distinction I’m trying to make between two strategies is a little tricky. I’m not arguing that Cengage, for example, thinks that their products aren’t great or that they think all anybody needs is the cheapest PDF possible. And on the other hand, “better enough” no longer means better editing or better production values, which is the way that textbook publishers used to position themselves against OER (and still do sometimes, although that reflex is beginning to fade). Rather, it’s about improving student outcomes.

    To borrow a phrase from David Wiley, the fight boils down to standard deviations per dollar. ((“Standard deviation” is just statistics geek speak for a measure of difference—in this case, improvement—from the norm.)) This formulation boils the battle down to a fraction. In the numerator, we have impact. In the denominator, we have cost. David likes to say that it’s easier to change the denominator, i.e., reduce cost, than it is to change the numerator, i.e., improve student outcomes. One of the reasons this is true is that putting a different product in a class usually doesn’t have a big impact unless the instructor’s teaching practices also change to take better advantage of the product’s features. Or, if you prefer a formulation that emphasizes the teaching over the tools (which I do), digital courseware tends to have the most impact in classrooms where it supports the chosen pedagogical approach of the instructor.

    For the incumbents, neither the numerator nor the denominator is particularly easy to change. In my last two posts, I wrote about the major investments—and risks—that Cengage took on to deliver their products at a better price point and still make their business model work (they hope).

    But that may be a cake walk for the publishers compared with the challenge of changing the numerator. In my original post about Pearson’s efficacy strategy, I explored these challenges at length. I have chosen to quote a hefty excerpt here because none of these problems have gone away:

    Let’s think some more about the analogy to efficacy in health care. Suppose Pfizer declared that they were going to define the standards by which efficacy in medicine would be measured. They would conduct internal research, cross-reference it with external research, come up with a rating system for the research, and define what it means for medicines to be effective. They would then apply those standards to their own medicines. And, after all is said and done, they would share their system with physicians and university researchers in the hopes that the medical community might be reassured about the quality of Pfizer’s products and maybe even contribute some ideas to the framework around the edges. How confident would we be that what Pfizer delivers would consistently be in the objective best interest of improving health?…

    If Pearson were to say to faculty, “Here’s what we think we know about the efficacy of this product, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here is how we are thinking about the question,” they might get a number of responses. Maybe they would get, “Oh, well here’s how I know that it’s effective with my class.” Or “The reason that you don’t have a good answer on effectiveness yet is that your rubric doesn’t provide a way to capture the educational value that your product delivers for my students.” Or “I don’t use this product because it has direct educational effectiveness. It frees me up from some grunt work so that I can conduct activities with the class that have educational impact.” Most of all, if you’re [Pearson CEO] John Fallon, you really want faculty to say to their sales reps, “Huh. I never thought about the product in quite those terms, and it makes me think a little differently about how I might use it going forward. What can you tell me about the effectiveness of this other product that I’m thinking about using, at least as Pearson sees it?” And you really want your sales reps to run back to the product teams, hair on fire, saying “Quick! Tell me everything you know about the effectiveness of this product!”

    Pearson won’t get that conversation by just publishing end results of their internal analysis when they have them, which means that they have a high risk of failing to align their products with the needs and desires of their market if they think about the relationship between their framework and their customers in that way….

    There are a number of reasons why this part of the transformation will be at least as difficult as the part that Pearson is undertaking now. First, it is far from clear that the company has the trust of the academic community that would be necessary for them to take such a role. That would have to be built, in some cases from the ground (or even the basement) up. Pearson does have real strengths that are known within certain segments of the academic community—in data science, for example—but this does not transfer to a general reputation. Second (and relatedly), unlike the medical research community, the educational research community is still nascent and fragmented. Finding non-paternalistic but effective ways to bring that community together and facilitate useful conversations will be difficult to say the least. These two challenges are outside the company’s sphere of control, which means that Pearson will have to develop new ways to think about how to build their relationships with the broader educational community.

    Internally, changing the way they think about answering the questions that the framework asks them will entail as much subtle, difficult, and pervasive re-engineering of the corporate reflexes and business processes as the work being undertaken now….  [A]ll textbook companies that have been around for a while are wired for a particular relationship with faculty that is at the heart of how they design, produce, and sell their products. Their editors have gone through decades of tuning the way they think and work to this process, and so have their customers. When Pearson layers a discussion of efficacy onto these business processes, a tension is created between the old and new ways of doing things. Suddenly, authors and customers don’t necessarily get what they want from their products just because they asked for them. There are potentially conflicting criteria. The framework itself provides nothing to help resolve this tension. At best, it potentially scaffolds a norming conversation. But a product management methodology that can combine knowledge about efficacy, user desires, and usability requires more tools than that. And that problem is even worse in some ways now that product teams have multiple specialized roles. The editor, author, adopting teacher, instructional designer, cognitive science researcher, psychometrician, data scientist, and UX engineer may all work together to develop a unified vision for a product, but more often than not they are like the blind man and the elephant. Agreeing in principle on what attributes an effective product might have is not at all the same as being able to design a product to be effective, where “effective” is shared notion between the company and the customers. ((Believe it or not, that is a short excerpt as measured as a percentage of the total word count of the post.))

    Publishers that want to improve the numerator will have to completely rewire the ways that they work, both internally and externally. They need to rethink their product design process from the ground up while simultaneously completely resetting their relationships with their customers.

    That post was published on December 31st, 2013. As we enter 2018, we are beginning to see examples of what such efforts might look like. For today’s example, I’m going to draw on recent work by Macmillan.

    Resetting the Conversation

    Before I get into the details, a little more disclosure than usual is called for here. I am a paid member of Macmillan’s Learning Impact Research Advisory Council (IRAC). As such, I was paid to provide input on the paper I’m about to write about as well as the underlying research processes that the paper describes. I was not paid to write this post about the paper. Or rather, I was paid to write something about it, but I was asked to write one page—one page!—of private feedback on the paper. I asked if I could write my feedback as a public blog post of unspecified length. The folks at Macmillan agreed.

    The paper is called Unpacking the Black Box of Efficacy: A framework for evaluating the effectiveness and researching the impact of digital learning tools. Registration is required.

    First piece of feedback for Macmillan: If you really want to foster a new dialog with academics, don’t start it by requiring them to give you their email addresses just to read your paper.

    But the approach outlined in the paper is another matter. Recall that in the Pearson post quoted above, I advised the company to approach customers with something like the following proposition:

    Here’s what we think we know about the efficacy of this product, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here is how we are thinking about the question.

    That is essentially what Macmillan’s paper attempts to do. It starts with an inventory, in plain English, some common educational research methods, how they work, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The section on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) alone is worth the price of admission, given how often it is simplistically held up as the “gold standard” in research. Any thoughtful educator reading the description of the process will immediately think, “Hey, that’s…problematic in education.”

    Even better, Macmillan was able to accomplish that with one page of text and one picture. They will need to be this incisive on a consistent basis if they are going to reach their intended audience.

    Next, the paper describes their product development lifecycle. Again, there is a good balance here of clarity and brevity. The first stage of that lifecycle is called “Co-design & Learning Research.” While publishers have pretty much always started their product design process with input from customers, I wouldn’t call the historic process “co-design.” Rather, it was typically an author/editor collaboration with some limited and focused customer input. More recently, publishers have developed all kinds of hybrid processes. But Macmillan at least claims to be starting with a clean sheet of paper. They are certainly not the only publisher to do this, but from a communication perspective, framing educational product design as a combination of co-design with customers and structured but comprehensible research is a good move.

    Speaking of which, the third section maps the various research methods described in the first section to the product design process in the second. There’s even a development timeline. The net effect is that educators (and students) have a clear and concise document explaining how Macmillan products are developed, how their potential learning impact is tested, and just how much it’s fair to say that the company knows about that impact at any stage in the development lifecycle.

    While I am by no means claiming credit, this paper reads as if it could have been written as a direct response to my critique of Pearson’s first iteration of efficacy.

    So yeah. I like it.

    Good Enough for What?

    You didn’t think I’d let them off that easily, did you?

    Remember waaay back, all the way at the beginning of the post, when I made the point that learning outcomes are hard to improve with curricular materials partly because their impact depends on what humans in the classroom do with them? That problem still looms, and Macmillan’s paper barely touches it.

    When I talk to students at length about the curricular materials that their instructors assign, their top complaint isn’t price. Don’t get me wrong; they hate the prices. But what they really hate is being told to buy a $200 book that the instructor barely mentions, let alone integrates into the class on a programmatic basis.

    This is what “better enough” is competing against. I always thought it was funny that textbook publishers refer to everything outside the book as “ancillaries,” because many instructors tend to see the categories as reversed. The book is ancillary. It’s not central to the learning that happens in the classroom. Before Macmillan, or any other publisher, can sell products based on the value proposition of “efficacy” or “learning impact” or “learning outcomes”, instructors must first come to believe that these three propositions are true:

    1. Instructors are responsible for learning how to improve their students’ learning outcomes by improving their teaching craft.
    2. Improving their teaching craft includes learning to employ research-validated practices.
    3. Macmillan’s products support and enable research-validated practices effectively enough that they can make the credible case for having more than “ancillary” value.

    This paper makes a good start—as good a start as any short paper can make—on the third proposition. The first proposition isn’t fair to lay at the publishers’ feet; it’s more driven by the incentives and culture of academia. It’s a problem, but not one that Macmillan or its peers can do much about directly. The second proposition is where the vendors, including but not limited to Macmillan, need to figure out how to do more.

    To be fair, the paper nibbles around the edges of this problem. The educators and product developers need to develop shared goals. That’s what a co-design process is for. Educators and product developers also need to develop a shared sense of proof that the goals are being met better by one method than another. A lot of the paper develops the basis for a conversation around this.

    But left implicit is the argument that education should be empirical and that empiricism needs to be formalized at least some of the time. There should be theories of learning impact and rules for what counts as evidence that supports or disproves those theories. This needs to apply not just to curricular materials design but for what happens in the classroom.

    It’s probably too much to expect this paper, as focused as it is, to open up this Pandora’s Box. This paper is, in part, a trust-building exercise, and Macmillan needs to build trust before they can fully own up to the fact that incorporating curricular materials that meaningfully improve learning outcomes usually entails a course redesign. But that’s where both Macmillan and the industry need to get to if they want to be able to sell more heavily researched and designed products at a higher price point.

    “Good enough” means “good enough for the way I use curricular materials in my classroom.” “Better enough” means “better enough that I’m convinced I should change the way I teach.” Macmillan has written a really good paper on the standards of proof they propose to live up to and how they propose to live up to them. But they also have to convince their customers to agree to live up to those same standards in their own teaching.

  • Before We Turn Over Curriculum To Apple And Amazon . . .

    Before We Turn Over Curriculum To Apple And Amazon . . .

    Recently I have been interviewed twice by EdSurge regarding education initiatives by the Big Five tech companies (Amazon and Apple, specifically). The first interview centered on iPads for all and Swift programming initiative at the Ohio State University.

    Hill believes Apple’s main motivation to do this collaboration with Ohio State was to sell devices.

    “The way I sort of look at them, Apple is like the Godot of education, where they’re the world’s largest company, and people keep waiting for them to do something meaningful in education, and not just sell devices, but actually get involved in education, change the game somehow,” says Hill.

    That has been a pattern with Apple, he argues, pointing to a big iPod program at Duke University in the early 2000s, which many see as failing to live up to the hype, or the failed iPad program at Los Angeles Unified School District more recently.

    Beyond the device sales, however, the more significant part of the initiative centered on programming skills:

    [The Apple / OSU collaboration] seeks to “integrate learning technology throughout the university experience,” an iOS design laboratory and opportunities for students to learn coding skills to make the ready for a career in the “app economy.”

    This plan is based on Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” initiative that sets up labs and a curriculum to teach students to program in Swift, Apple’s app language primarily designed for iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS (although there are a small number cases of using it for Windows and Android). Just two weeks after the Ohio State news, Apple announced that “Australia’s RMIT Joins More Than 20 International Universities in Adopting Apple Curriculum”.

    Apple today announced the global expansion of its Everyone Can Code initiative to more than 20 colleges and universities outside of the US. These schools will now offer the App Development with Swift Curriculum, a full-year course designed by Apple engineers and educators to teach coding and app design to students of all levels and backgrounds. Now hundreds of thousands of students from around the world gain the opportunity to become proficient in the Swift programming language and build the fundamental skills they need to pursue careers in the booming app economy.

    In a second interview with EdSurge, I was asked about recent support from Amazon giving away Echo devices and promoting Alexa.

    In August, Amazon gifted 1,600 Echo Dots to engineering students at Arizona State University living in a new dorm. John German, an ASU spokesperson, said at the time that the university’s motivation was to develop an opportunity for its engineering students to get skills in the “emerging field” of voice technology. An Amazon spokesperson explained in August that Amazon officials imagine a world where their devices are entwined in student life.

    To push these efforts further, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a research competition where university teams developing new ideas for conversational artificial intelligence can get monetary prizes. A team from the University of Washington won the 2017 competition, getting $500,000. Applications are now open for the 2018 competition.

    My comments on the combination of moves by Apple and Amazon:

    For Phil Hill, an edtech consultant and blogger at e-Literate, it’s no surprise that big tech companies want college graduates to be familiar, if not well-versed, with their tools. He says these companies want to fill the gap “between traditional corporate training and higher education,” creating a “tighter connection” between students getting a college degree and an initial job with the needed skills.

    It’s not a new endeavor by any means. Hill remembers that in the 1980s, Sun Microsystems provided workstations for university students. The company’s business plan explicitly stated under its marketing approach to put “SUN workstations into selected universities to gain visibility.” The idea, says Hill, was to get people “sort of hooked on using Unix” and programming skills that could be used in the workforce.

    Sun also worked closely with schools to establish physical training centers. In 1999 the company and the University of Pittsburgh opened an “Academic Java Center” meant to train and certify students in Java technology.

    Beyond showing my age, what I wanted to highlight with the SUN comments is that there has been a big change in tech industry that colleges and universities should be cautious about. The big five tech companies operate on closed ecosystems, with custom programming languages, custom devices, and proprietary platforms. Whereas the focus on Java in the 80s and 90s enabled students to learn a general-purpose language that could run on any number of platforms, Swift is primarily for the Apple devices, and Alexa is for Echo. Company-specific languages and technology.

    The initiatives from Apple and Amazon are not just to give out freebies, they intend to get more students learning their proprietary languages and coming out of college with skills applicable to their closed ecosystems. Also mentioned by EdSurge is an initiative from Google to promote its virtual reality platform Daydream. These efforts specifically include designing curricula for higher education institutions to adopt.

    Perhaps it would be useful to compare these recent initiatives with the Cisco Networking Academy, which provides curriculum and support for 9,500 schools and over 1 million students worldwide that “identifies and develops the skills people and businesses need to thrive in a digital economy”. ((Disclosure: Cisco is a past client of MindWires, our consulting business, including advice on Networking Academy. Amazon is also a past client.)) The Networking Academy also includes Cisco hardware and software as part of their package, and there is a focus on Cisco-specific platforms.

    One difference, however, is that the Networking Academy can lead to general-purpose certifications in addition to Cisco-specific ones, including those for C, C++, Linux, and CompTIA entry-level computer installation.

    What we see here is an evolution of big-tech support for colleges and universities that mirrors the general tech industry migration from more-open to more-closed ecosystems. Higher education institutions need to be fully aware of and cautious of these changes, as the more recent efforts lose most of the general-purpose educational outcomes and encourage students to move into a closed ecosystem. An Ohio State U graduate of the future who has gone through the Everyone Can Code curriculum will be much more likely to remain an iOS app programmer than an Android programmer, for example. This means that the schools entering into the new partnerships are tying themselves much more closely with specific companies than was the case in the past.

    There are real benefits to these initiatives (even though the iPads for all benefits are overblown), but these decisions should not be taken lightly just for the promise of free stuff. There are real implications to tying curriculum to specific company ecosystems. And maybe schools would do well to insist that these partnerships include support for alternative languages and more general-purpose learning outcomes.

    Update 12/30: Clarified language that while Swift is primarily designed for Apple devices, it can be used in cases for others. See comments below for additional info.

  • Cengage Unlimited Draws the Battle Lines in the Curricular Materials War

    Cengage Unlimited Draws the Battle Lines in the Curricular Materials War

    As Phil wrote about recently, Cengage has announced “Cengage Unlimited,” which is being described in various outlets as the “Netflix” or “Spotify” of curricular materials. It’s an all-you-can-eat digital subscription service to Cengage’s complete catalog. Spotify is probably the more apt comparison, both because the Netflix analogy is contaminated and because the music industry is a more apt analogy for the economic pressure this puts on content creators.

    Make no mistake; this is a potential inflection point in the curricular materials market. There is a war raging between curricular materials that are “good enough,” meaning that the lower price has a bigger impact on student outcomes than any differences in the quality of more expensive alternatives, versus “better enough,” meaning both instructors and students believe the product makes a sufficient difference in student outcomes that the more expensive product is worth the premium. Cengage is betting the farm on “good enough” beating out “better enough” and, win or lose, their bet could cause tectonic shifts in how curricular materials are developed, purchased, and used. It will have implications for inclusive access, adaptive courseware, textbook companies, textbook authors, and the landscape of options available to students and teachers.

    (more…)

  • Cengage Unlimited – Marketing ploy or significant change in strategy?

    Cengage Unlimited – Marketing ploy or significant change in strategy?

    One week ago Cengage announced Unlimited, an all-you-can-read subscription for their digital course materials. For $120 per academic term, students get access to any and all of Cengage’s 20,000 digital titles with the ability to also get a print rental for $7.99 (shipping costs) per title. Once the subscription ends, students keep access to up to six digital textbooks for another year at no additional cost.

    When interviewed for an Inside Higher Ed article, I commented:

    Phil Hill, the co-publisher of the blog e-Literate and a partner at MindWires Consulting, said that he was “impressed” by the Cengage announcement. “It’s like someone at Cengage woke up and decided to take this digital content transformation seriously,” he said. “If you combine Cengage Unlimited with the OpenNow announcement, both of them really represent a rethinking of Cengage’s business model.” While Cengage and other publishers have dipped their toes into digital-first models, Cengage is “taking the lead,” he said.

    To me this is big news – a real change in business model from one of the big three academic publishers in higher education. Publishers have long suffered from their own historical success in two key areas. One is the restrictive content licensing terms that have restricted student and faculty to narrow usage while also restricting the publisher based on author rights. The other is the business model that treats content as a scarce resource, leading to high unit costs (the $300+ textbook) and a focus on top-line revenue. Both issues make it difficult for the publishers to rethink models and take advantage of digital content to address growing concerns on affordability, but Cengage Unlimited appears to represent a rethinking of how to get past these barriers and bet on future usage patterns.

    Initially, the main person who seemed to throw cold water on this interpretation was Cengage’s own CEO Michael Hansen from comments also at IHE.

    While Hansen said that the announcement of Cengage Unlimited was significant, he said he didn’t think it represented a big shift in strategy for the company.

    This comment confused me. Is Cengage Unlimited a marketing ploy rather than a significant change in strategy? The Netflix of Textbooks usage in national media certainly adds to the skepticism.

    Michael and I had the opportunity to interview CEO Hansen along with EVP and Chief Product Officer Fernando Bleichmar last week. Both Hansen and Bleichmar were quite direct in answering our questions, and I came away reassured that this move does represent a significant change in strategy that goes beyond what we have seen from academic publishers in the past.

    When asked about how to read interpret his comments, Hansen replied that “nothing changes and everything changes”. What doesn’t change is that the executive team believes digital experience is better experience for students. They have built products over five years that they believe serve this purpose, and Cengage have set a strategic goal of being 90 percent digital by 2019.

    What has changed is that Cengage executives now fully recognize that affordability is a barrier for students. According to Hansen, while faculty tend to appreciate the better learning experience possible through digital technology, “we in the industry have put our heads in the sand on affordability”, thinking students and faculty would ‘see the beauty’ of what publishers produce and be willing to pay higher prices. Yet Bleichmar pointed out that 70% of students are not using digital, largely due to affordability.

    From our perspective, publishers have in general recognized the problem of affordability and have made efforts to reduce prices particularly through digital offerings. Cengage Unlimited, however, is the first time a publisher has made affordability the centerpiece of their strategy -both in business model and in branding.

    There will be real implications to the changes due to Unlimited. One is that it will now be very difficult for Cengage to get more than a handful of students paying for $200 or $300 textbooks. The $120 price along with print rental option should place a cap on what it makes sense to spend on any one book, particularly for general education courses. Take the infamous Greg Mankiw’s Principle of Economics textbook. Currently the MindTap (digital platform) access for six months costs $130, and if you add the bound book it costs $355. If Cengage Unlimited is successful, the days are over when the publisher can get these unit prices. There will also be a cap on what Cengage can make with multiple digital offerings. Bleichmar acknowledged that Cengage would have to make up in volume what they are giving up in price-per-unit.

    A recent model that several publishers have been trying lately is ‘inclusive access’ as described by Inside Higher Ed just a month ago.

    Major education publishers — including Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education — report that the number of colleges offering “inclusive-access” programs has grown rapidly in recent years. Where previously students might have been assigned textbooks individually, now many institutions are signing up whole classes of students to automatically receive digital course materials at a discounted rate, rather than purchasing individually. The “inclusive” aspect of the model means that every student has the same materials on the first day of class, with the charge included as part of their tuition.

    According to Hansen and Bleichmar, Unlimited is a much bigger deal than inclusive access, moving from à la carte to a all-you-can-eat model. Cengage will offer both, but they believe Unlimited will have a bigger impact on affordability.

    There is absolutely short-term risk involved in this move, but Hansen pointed out that this risk should be compared to that of the current trajectory. “The risk of doing nothing is much higher than what we’re facing right now” without a change.

    Cengage’s short video on YouTube actually plays to this idea that Unlimited represents a change from the past, no longer seeing previous boundaries as limitations to live within. Yes, it’s marketing material, but in this case I believe it represents the thinking of a company coming up with new strategies.

    Will this model work? That we do not know. One factor to consider is that college textbook adoption has never been a rational model. The consumer (student) has had limited ability to choose products based on affordability, even if that situation has changed somewhat with rental and used book options, piracy, and the choice to not acquire required course materials. In addition, the ability to find different options is typically tricky and requires time and know-how. It would be a mistake to think that even if Unlimited represents a rational better choice students will automatically jump at the chance. Furthermore, open educational resources (OER) have made real inroads recently and represent even lower-cost options (often free, often $25 per textbook when bundled in platform).

    What I do feel confident about is that Cengage is making a big bet with a new model that is more significant than ‘inclusive access’ or previous attempts from publishers to go digital. This is not just a marketing ploy, it’s a change in strategy driven by new understanding of affordability concerns.

    Update: Cengage no longer goes by Cengage Learning. Post edited accordingly.

  • Cengage OpenNow: Big news on the OER front hiding in plain sight

    Cengage OpenNow: Big news on the OER front hiding in plain sight

    In the week prior to the OpenEd conference, Cengage Learning made a fairly big announcement with OpenNow, a “suite of digital products for general education courses with open educational resources (OER) content”. In an article from Inside Higher Education, I noted that this news was not out of the blue.

    Phil Hill, the co-publisher of the blog e-Literate and a partner at MindWires Consulting, said he was not surprised by Cengage’s OER announcement. “If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Cengage has been saying for at least a year that they wanted to get into this space,” he said. Hill says he was surprised, however, at how aggressively Cengage seemed to be promoting OER with this announcement. “We’ve seen other publishers dipping their toes in, but this seems as if it is central to Cengage’s strategy.” He noted that the announcement could cause other publishers to accelerate their OER strategies. “The movement is not going away,” he said.

    Rather than looking at this specific news in isolation, it would be helpful to put this in some historical context showing the interplay of the OER movement and changing strategies from the big textbook publishers. We advise a number of large and small publishers in our role as consultants, and they occasionally ask us to help them to better understand some of the points we’ve been making about OER in our posts over the years. Put another way, here comes a thread of historical e-Literate quotes.

    In response to a 2011 article in the Chronicle titled “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources”, Michael (then an employee of Cengage) chastised his fellow textbook industry professsionals, writing:

    Many different open source-related business models have been tried with varying degrees of success. Some open source projects have become sustainable as pure volunteer efforts while others have needed commercial support.

    I see no reason to believe that open educational resources will be any different. Right now, we’re in the early days. It’s very hard to predict which sustainability models will work or who the winners and losers will be. But I think it’s reasonable to predict that, five years from now (a) there will still be for-profit textbook publishers (though their all-digital products probably won’t be called textbooks by then) and (b) most or all for-profit textbook publishers will be involved with the production, support, and/or distribution of OERs in some way or other. There will likely be some OER projects that will have achieved long-term sustainability without commercial support and others that will have achieved long-term sustainability because of commercial support.

    It’s more than six years later, but (a) note the burgeoning category of courseware, and (b) see Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, and Cengage initiatives, among others. Put simply, it was apparent that publishers needed OER strategies at least as far back as 2011.

    Fast forward to 2014 when Michael had departed Cengage to enter the joyous world of market analysis and consulting, he offered the observation that many publishers actually like OER:

    For the most part, OER was just not something publishers thought a lot about.

    That has changed in US higher education as it has become clear that textbook profits are collapsing as student find more ways to avoid buying the new books. The traditional textbook business is clearly not viable in the long term, at least in that market, at least at the scale and margins that the bigger publishers are used to making. So these companies want to get out of the textbook business. A few of them will say that publicly, but many of them say it among themselves. They don’t want to be out of business. They just want to be out of the textbook business. They want to sell software and services that are related to educational content, like homework platforms or course redesign consulting services. But they know that somebody has to make the core curricular content in order to for them to “add value” around that content. As David Wiley puts it, content is infrastructure. Increasingly, textbook publishers are starting to think that maybe OER can be their infrastructure. This is why, for example, it makes sense for Wiley (the publisher, not the dude) to strike a licensing deal with OpenStax. They’re OK about not making a lot of money on the books as long as they can sell their WileyPlus software. Which, in turn, is why I think that Wiley (the dude, not the publisher) is not crazy at all when he predicts that “80% of all US general education courses will be using OER instead of publisher materials by 2018.” I won’t be as bold as he is to pick a number, but I think he could very well be directionally correct. I think many of the larger publishers hope to be winding down their traditional textbook businesses by 2018.

    This point is crucial, as OER is not just an opportunity to co-opt a movement but a potential strategy for publishers to solve an existential problem.

    In 2016 Cengage released a survey on OER adoption and attitudes, which to me signaled that they were getting quite serious about figuring out their strategy.

    According to [VP of Content Strategy] Costantini, the reason Cengage did this study is that in their view OER is another type of content, and there are high-level conversations at schools about adoption. Costantini described Cengage as making a move for a while to not be as proprietary, with the MindTap platform as an example where multiple content types – proprietary and OER – can be combined or used individually. Cengage views themselves as excellent curators, and OER content fits into this view. They want to accelerate this shift, and internally they need to better understand the dynamics of OER usage.

    By spring of 2017, Cengage put further meat on the OER bone with the release of a podcast series, where I noted:

    And this new podcast fits in the same mold. Cengage does not fully understand OER, but they seem to like it and see it as a way to help them out of a hole, and while they learn more, the company is sharing their learnings through surveys, resource pages, and podcasts.

    Given some mistakes in how the podcast was released, I suggested that Cengage learn and use David Wiley’s description of the 5 Rs of open (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute) in their material. ((Disclosure: David Wiley’s company Lumen Learning is a client of MindWires.)) With this historical context in mind, let’s turn back to the OpenNow announcement and the next stage of Cengage’s move into OER strategy.

    In an interview with Cheryl Constantini, she described how Cengage released MindTap ACE last year and learned some key lessons about OER. While many people want affordable solutions, the market feedback according to Cengage was that if you’re going to go OER, go all in with OER – mixing with proprietary doesn’t resonate. This led to OpenNow as a pure OER play, unlike MindTap ACE.

    Constantini also described the market feedback on the need for simplicity and that MindTap ACE had too many features. This led to the choice of using Learning Objects, a platform Cengage acquired in 2016, to be the base for OpenNow. The approach is to take OER standard textbooks, realign them as outcomes-based design along with associated assessments and added videos, and release everything with an open license. Nine of the 12 initial courses are from OpenStax, and three are re-licensed courses from Cengage now with CC-BY licenses. The videos use YouTube open licenses.

    For each course Constantini estimates that the modifications take $50k – $100k of internal work, including verifying of licenses for embedded elements. I would note a certain irony here in that OpenStax produces more-or-less traditional digital textbooks requiring publishers or OER services companies like Lumen to break apart and realign to competencies or outcomes.

    Cengage charges $25 per student per course for OpenNow.

    The assessments and instructor manuals raise a “burning issue” about whether they should be accessible by students or not. Initially Cengage is adopting the OpenStax pattern of licensing openly but controlling by passwords; however, this is a subject they need to think through and figure out over time.

    At the OpenEd conference last month, there was significant interest in the OpenNow presentation with people spilling over into the hallway. The movement of publishers into the OER space is real, and this release from Cengage should be viewed as part of a long-term shift in strategy. And one that attempts to fully embrace OER as seen by this interesting description:

    • High-quality, 100% OER narrative and assessment content from Cengage, OpenStax and other third-party sources.
    • CC-BY-licensed (5Rs), so instructors and institutions can adapt and reuse all narrative and assessment content as needed.

    Update: Added description of pricing model.

  • Recommended Reading … or Not: Updates on UC Berkeley and NBER stories

    Recommended Reading … or Not: Updates on UC Berkeley and NBER stories

    Here are two updates on stories we’ve covered recently at e-Literate. One is an actual update and that is a lack of update.

    UC Berkeley and Accessibility

    In our post clarifying the context of the school’s decision to remove lecture capture video from public site (not deleting the video, just putting behind domain wall), one issue I raised was that there is no agreement yet between Berkeley and the Department of Justice / Department of Education team pushing the case. (more…)

  • Lumen and Follett: Canary in the Curricular Materials Coal Mine?

    Lumen and Follett: Canary in the Curricular Materials Coal Mine?

    Phil wrote up some excellent observations yesterday about the announcement that Follett has invested in Lumen Learning and will be distributing some of their products. This deal has more significance for the curricular materials market than the (relatively) small dollar amount of the investment would indicate.

    (more…)