e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • MOOCs: A slowly deflating “Bubble”?

    BubbleAccording to Forbes’ John Tamny “Online education only offers learning that the markets don’t desire, and because it does, its presumed merits are greatly oversold. There’s your ‘bubble.’” He summarizes “Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught. And that’s why there’s no ‘bubble’ forming in the university world.”

    Tamny’s opinion is both different from most business analysts and important. His conclusion discourages further investment in current and potential start-up enterprises. It also presents another perspective for institutional boards and governments seeking to better understand the role of education technology.

    Joshua Kim, in his Inside Higher Ed blog “Learn,” (here and here) was frustrated by Tamny’s choice of the term “online education.” Kim correctly reports online education technology is heavily used in traditional classrooms as well. Tmany’s article divided higher education between colleges and universities offering classroom instruction and firms offering online education that lack contact with peers and faculty—the typical MOOC provider (Massive Open Online Course). These are two extremes of Kim’s spectrum of the use of “online” technology.  Tamny did not use the term “MOOC” itself.

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  • The Death and Rebirth of Sakai OAE

    Last fall, when Indiana University, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and Charles Sturt University all pulled out of the Sakai OAE project, it looked like the end for the Sakai community’s next-generation platform effort. The vastly reduced project team, consisting mainly of Cambridge, Georgia Tech, and Marist College, went into quiet mode as they attempted to figure out what could be salvaged. Now, about nine months later, they have re-emerged with a late beta of a completely re-architected system, promising a 1.0 release in early July. They have also rebranded them project as Apereo OAE, named after the new organization that is the merger of the Sakai and Jasig Foundations, and signaling clearly that the project is not intended to be a successor to Sakai but instead is its own separate project with its own separate destiny.

    In retrospect, it turns out that the breakup of the grand coalition and resulting near-death experience may be the best thing that ever happened to the project.

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  • California’s Online Education Bill SB 520 Passes Senate

    Last week senate bill 520 (SB 520) unanimously passed the California senate, and it is now heading to the assembly for review and, if passed, on to the governor for signature. I have covered the basics of SB520, shared the text of the bill, and described the first round of amendments to the bill. Michael and I have both provided commentary of the bill, and we have also written a position paper for The 20 Million Minds Foundation on the general topic of online education in California.

    Now that the bill has passed its major test in the senate, it would be worth comparing the current bill with that proposed a few months ago, as the amendments have been significant. The majority of amendments have been in response to faculty concerns about governance and quality assurance of online courses. The full text of the current bill can be found here.

    Highlight of Changes

    Original proposal of SB520 would have:

    • Created the California Online Student Access Platform to be administered by the California Open Education Resources Council (the one created to administer California’s OER law SB1052);
    • Created a single pool of online versions of “the 50 most impacted lower division courses” across all three systems (University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges);
    • Required the three systems to provide credit to students who successful take and pass the courses; and
    • Included content that has been reviewed and recommended by the American Council on Education.

    Current version of SB 520 that passed senate would:

    • Create a set of three Incentive Grant programs for online courses to be administered by the office of President or Chancellor for each system “in consultation with their respective statewide academic senates”;
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  • LMS Market Update: May and June News

    There have been a number of LMS and Learning Platform announcements over the past month or two that will help shape the market over the next year or more. One trend I’ve described is the transition from an LMS market to a Learning Platform market, which includes a broader scope of products. Below are some of the notable announcements. I expect that Michael and I will write separate posts in more detail on several of these updates.

    • LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact
    • Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M
    • Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release
    • Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE
    • Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market
    • edX finishes releasing platform code as open source
    • LMS conference season approaching

    LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact

    In mid May, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik hosted a panel discussion of the LMS CEOs at the Learning Impact conference. Blackboard’s new CEO, Jay Bhatt, was welcomed into the higher education community with the, ahem, liveliest panel discussion in recent memory. Given the all-star panel (John Baker, CEO, Desire2Learn; Jay Bhatt, CEO, Blackboard; Josh Coates, CEO Instructure; Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle; Manoj Kutty, CEO, LoudCloud Systems; Matt Leavy, CEO, Pearson eCollege), I’ve been surprised to see very little discussion after the event.

    But then I remembered:

    The First Rule of the LMS Panel is you do not talk about the LMS Panel

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  • MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article:

     Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC users, the company realized that most of them had already earned college degrees, said Ms. Koller. That was well and good, but it suggested to Coursera’s founders that MOOCs would not be sufficient to achieve their ambitions.

    “If you’re looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you’re going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with,” Ms. Koller said.

    and from the New York Times:

    “Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

    These statements can be understood by looking at the demographic data for students that have been taking xMOOCs (i.e. from Coursera, Udacity and edX) in their first year.

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  • The Right to Educational Access Paper, Part IV

    Update: This paper can be found at the 20MM site and has also been broken into four separate posts on e-Literate:

    Recommendations

    The scope of this position paper is an analysis and set of recommendations on the “application of state-driven online education initiatives to address the bottleneck course problem at the three public systems in California”. In particular, we should address the question of of how the state could most effectively invest the proposed $37 million in funding, above and beyond the increased general funding to the three systems.

    The key aspect for increased online education is to create and support a new right – for matriculated students to have access to the courses they need to complete their degrees.

    Towards achieving that goal, we recommend the following:

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  • MOOC as Courseware: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed:

    Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses.

    Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players.

    The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera’s online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

    One key aspect of this announcement is Coursera’s full-fledged move into courseware as a new business line to complement their standalone courses. Courseware is the combination of “the curriculum, the course materials, the assessments and, in some cases, the analytics to track student progress and make study suggestions” as described in Michael’s post “MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact“. In essence, courseware is everything but the instructor and interactive discussion, certification and support. This is what is meant by “wrapping” around a MOOC.

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