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.

  • Online Learning: Where is the Money?

    MIT offers their MITx online courses and certificates for a price, Stanford offers some online courses free, and Utah State University professor Wiley provides successful students with letters confirming course completion. But offering online learning has failed many using these business models. Cambridge, Chicago, Cornell, Michigan, New York and Oxford, Stanford, Temple and Yale Universities, University of Maryland University College and the London School of Economics all terminated their online courses for financial reasons. They were all started assuming student tuition and fees would pay for both the cost of operation and for developing very effective, high quality course materials.

    As Case Western Vice President for Information Services Lev Gonick summarized: ”University presidents got dollars in their eyes and figured the way the university was going to ride the dot-com wave was through distance learning.”

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  • Why Ed Tech Innovation Is Speeding Up

    I have a lot to write about, coming off of BbWorld and Desire2Learn FUSION. But before I get into all of that, I just have to publish this brief “Amen” post to Phil’s last one. It’s hard to overestimate the impact that lower cost of development is going to have on educational technology in the years ahead. Instagram had only 13 employees—only eight of which were actually software developers—when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. The new owners of Digg have announced that they expect to rebuild the entire platform from the ground up in six months. It is literally an order of magnitude cheaper to build a platform today than it was ten years ago, when concrete foundations of the current-generation LMS architectures were being poured.

    The change in cost can be attributed to several factors:

    • Proliferation of open source: The vast majority of software being built today, regardless of the license it is sold under, makes extensive use of open source frameworks that simply did not exist a decade ago. These commodity components mean that startups today don’t have to pay expensive license fees (for a database, for example) and don’t have to re-invent the wheel building plumbing. They can focus their time and money on the new parts.
    • Growth of cloud technologies: Software isn’t the only thing that has commoditized. One useful way of thinking about the cloud is as the commoditization of hardware. (Importantly for ed tech, this is definitely not the only useful way of thinking about it, but that’s another post for another time.) It’s now easy for companies to get very cheap access to computing power and storage, and to scale that access—and its cost—just-in-time in response to demand.
    • Advances in engineering craft: The development of Agile and Learn approaches to software development and design, when properly applied, can very substantially reduce the number and size of costly mistakes. These mistakes are arguably the most dangerous and costly expenses of digital product creation because they are unpredictable and can cause lasting and cumulative damage that is hard to undo.
    The degree to which existing market entrants can beat back new entrants will depend, in part, on their ability to embrace these innovations. It is simply a lot cheaper and quicker for a new market entrant to build a competitive, full-featured product than it used to be. That isn’t necessarily going to be easy for them. 

  • Lore Announcement Shows Promise of Cloud-Based Platforms: Low Cost of Design

    You have to give credit where it’s due – Lore is a fast-moving ed tech startup that is not resting on its laurels. The New York based learning platform company has already rebranded (changing its name from Coursekit to Lore) and rewritten its core platform from the ground up. All in its first year.

    In their latest press release:

    Since launching seven months ago, instructors at over 600 schools—including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton—have adopted the platform. Lore gives courses a home online, providing management tools like a gradebook, and a Facebook-like environment for students to communicate with each other. [snip]

    “We’ve completely re-designed the platform in the new version,” said 21-year-old CEO, Joe Cohen. “It’s an order of magnitude more beautiful, easy to use, and powerful. ”A highlight of the new version, instructors now have the ability to make their courses available for the public to “audit.” Additionally, Lore now provides all students and instructors with individual profiles to showcase their background, academic achievements, and aspirations.

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  • Whose Data Is It Anyway?

    I admit: I don’t read Terms of Service agreements before hitting the “Accept” button. I doubt many folks do, save the lawyers who actually write them. As such, it’s hard for me to write an article wagging my finger at those of us who adopt software only to realize later that it has quite onerous terms – that we’ve granted someone an irrevocable license to our content, that we’ve agreed to have our data mined and sold to third parties. 

    Ignorantia juris non excusat. Caveat emptor. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

    Moreover, I write this article on the heels of several rants penned last week about my inability to access the Twitter archives for the ISTE12 hashtag. “I can’t even export my own Twitter archives!” I tweeted in frustration. (Yes, I realize the irony.) But I do love Twitter; it’s one of my favorite tools. Nonetheless, I’ve started keeping my own personal Twitter archive (thanks ifttt!), and more broadly, I’m trying to make sure all the other services I rely on let me export and/or host my data, allow me to opt-out of data-mining, and offer me user-friendly terms.

    Easier said than done – in consumer as in ed-tech.

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  • Going to be at BbWorld and D2L Fusion Conferences

    This is just a quick note to let you know that I will be at BbWorld next week (my first!) and D2L Fusion the week after. (I am determined to make it to InstructureCon next year; it’s the last one I will not have been to yet.) If anybody wants to track me down, tweet or email me.

  • We need a new Software Recruitment Paradigm: Software as a Mission

    Software procurement underwent radical change in the face of “the cloud.”  The paradigm of purchasing a static piece of software that met your requirements, installing it (or having it installed) locally, and then purchasing updates went out the window over the past decade.  Some organizations still follow the old model, but there are fewer and fewer of them and they are dying off.  CTOs who obstinately refuse the cloud out of security concerns are cowboys in a world of interstate highways, and old enterprise software vendors are carriage makers circa 1920.

    Software as a Service has been the new model.  Salesforce and many others have proved that Software is not a static product, it is a continually updating service.  Buying software is as easy as going to the dry cleaners, dropping off your dirty laundry and picking up clean, pressed sartorial concerns.  You can sign up for or subscribe to software for $50 bucks a month per user, sometimes basic products are free and additional functionality costs money (the fermium approach), others still are supported by selling information or eyeballs to advertisers.

    But in the past three years or so, there’s been an absolute explosion in software companies building tools on the Internet.  The sheer quantity of .coms .lys .ios . ins will just blow your mind.  Just read TechCrunch for a few days and your thumb will get tired from hooking up these new services to Facebook Connect or one of your other online identities.

    How do you evaluate companies that are three months old?  How can you prove efficacy to something that launched two weeks ago?  Why should you write a check to a bunch of people staring at computer screens that jam to techno and have dogs running around their office?

    Software as a Service is no longer an accurate description of the paradigm of innovation, of the relationship between customer and service provider.  We need a more accurate term.

    Software as a Mission.

    Software can move so fast that customers are not only not buying a static product anymore, they are also not subscribing to a defined service, they are now believers in a mission and hanging on for the ride.  And the ride is fast enough to be a bullet train, but can also be a roller coaster.  Companies that seem promising can suddenly get acquired, or go down in flames from premature scaling.  They can get a strong competitor coming out of left field.

    The question is no longer “Do you like the product?” As much as: “Do you believe in the company?  Do you believe in their direction?  Do you believe in the team?”

    And if you bet on the wrong horse, it’s not as big of a deal as it used to be.  You just take your credit card to the next one doing the thing you wanted doing.  No big deal.  The cost of implementation is usually just people hooking up their identities and choosing a password, at most uploading a spreadsheet.

    By the way, this also means you won’t just have one vendor for what your communities or teams need.  You’ll likely have several, and functionality will overlap.  We’re going to have to be Zen about that.

    So, let me ask you this question: think about your vendors.  Picture them.  Do you believe in the company?  Do you believe in their mission, their direction, their team?  Believing is so important because great teams can ship software really quickly, and what you have next year will not be what you have this year.  Believing is important because small teams of people can now produce software that millions of people use.  (At one point there were almost 2 Million Twitter users for every Twitter employee, same goes for Instagram.)  Designing and developing software is more of a craft than an assembly line.  Old paradigms of product development created McDonalds.  SaaS introduced the Olive Garden.  But let’s face it, we really want our software to come from organizations like the French Laundry.  We want our Software to be produced with great theory and execution, by a small team of people paying infinite attention to detail to provide an excellent experience.

  • Blackboard and MoodleRooms: An insight to private equity

    There has been speculation about Blackboard’s acquisition of MoodleRooms and its announcements about support of open-source learning systems. This is also an opportunity to see decision-making by Blackboard owner Providence Equity. The motivation of a private equity firm is rapid increase in the value of its assets. Some of Blackboard initiatives may take several years to take final form; perhaps longer than private equity objectives permit.

    Blackboard describes their software business saying: “We typically license our individual software applications either on a stand-alone basis or bundled as part of one of our six product lines: Blackboard Learn Blackboard Transact Blackboard Connect Blackboard Mobile Blackboard Collaborate and Blackboard Analytics.” Professional services account for 8% of revenue; product for 92%.

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