LMS & Learning Platforms – Page 9

Ellucian Stops Support for Brainstorm, its CBE platform

In a surprise move, Ellucian has decided to end support for Brainstorm, the competency-based education (CBE) platform it acquired from Helix Education two years ago. All Brainstorm customers are being notified of the end-of-life and aggressive measures are being used to help these customers quickly migrate to alternative platforms.

Ellucian staff contacted me to share the general news of ending Brainstorm support. The stated reason for this change is that Ellucian perceives that there is insufficient market demand for full CBE programs, with many schools looking to ease into CBE in a minimalist fashion (I’m paraphrasing here). Brainstorm was designed primarily for non seat-time courses that are fully based on a competency framework and self-paced student access. We have covered Brainstorm / Helix on these issues here, including this observation:

One educational model that is becoming more and more important is competency-based education (CBE). One of the challenges for this model is that the traditional LMS – based on a traditional model using grades, seat time and synchronous cohort of students – is not easily adapted to serve CBE needs.

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February 14, 2017

Scaling Educational Access

There’s an interesting piece in EdSurge about the potential access to education challenge that CUNY will face if Governor Cuomo makes good on his proposal to make college tuition free:

According to the CUNY 2016 Student Experience Survey, 21 percent of the system’s community college students were not able to take required courses, most citing “lack of seat availability” as the reason. In an interview, George Otte, CUNY’s director of academic technology, described the “bottleneck” created by course shortages. Students were not able to take required courses because demand for space exceeded capacity—a problem that could get worse if more free tuition-seekers pour in. “We have always had lots of enrollment, which is one of the reasons I think we were late to the online course offerings. Our mission was never to gain students from the outside,” he explains, “but we are just beginning to realize that this has an enormous impact on capacity.”

“The real challenge is that eligibility is predicated on full-time enrollment,” Otte says, citing a caveat community colleges cannot ignore. Without taking 15 hours a semester, which equals full-time enrollment, students are not elible for Gov. Cuomo’s free tuition program—the Excelsior Scholarship. However, at least half of community college students work full-time. It is unlikely that such a population can opt-in to campus-based instruction that requires them to commute and show up for courses offered only at, say, 9 a.m. or 4 p.m.

It turns out that we’ve done a lot of work in this area, particularly in the state of California, and have some lessons learned that are worth sharing.

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February 9, 2017

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.

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January 23, 2017

Nordic EdTech Network Podcast Interview

On December 12, Michael and I joined Eilif Trondsen for a podcast interview for the Nordic EdTech Network. One of the primary activities for the network is to “help Nordic EdTech companies become better informed about the EdTech industry and landscape not only in the Nordic region but also of the global EdTech market dynamics.” Put another way, Eilif is a great network connector. You can access the podcast interview at this page. We are also sharing the interview below.

Some of the questions:

What are a couple of things/developments that you have seen out there in the education industry that you think either have had significant impact on current edtech markets, or that may well have significant impact on these markets in the next 2-3 years or so?
What have we seen in European procurements related to edtech and how would that impact smaller startups and non-LMS vendors?
Do you see opportunities in learning analytics and adaptive learning vendors [with an interest comment about whether Knewton is going to be a dominant player]?
Do you have any recommended Dos and Don’ts for any Nordic edtech vendors considering to target the US market?

December 21, 2016

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…)

December 13, 2016

New Release of European LMS Market Report

Our Spring 2016 LMS Market Report from our new LMS subscription service focused mostly on the United States and Canada. The LMS market, however is increasingly global in nature. LMS suppliers rely on markets outside of US and Canada for growth, and Moodle in particular has a long history of global adoption. Maintaining a US/Canadian view without additional data can be misleading when forecasting the roadmaps and future states of various LMS solutions.

What we haven’t had until now is a view of the LMS market in Europe. Thanks to our partnership with LISTedTECH, we can now share data from more than 1,600 higher education institutions throughout Europe and provide the first independent market analysis for this region. While this report and future analysis is part of the LMS subscription service, we are sharing the initial version freely with a CC-BY license. (more…)

December 1, 2016

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

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