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.

  • What the Microsoft Investment in Barnes & Noble Means for E-textbooks

    This morning, Microsoft and Barnes and Noble announced that the software giant is investing $300 million in a new B&N subsidiary that will include the Nook and B&N College divisions. Microsoft’s investment gives it a 17.6 percent stake in the newco and ensures that Windows 8 will launch with the Nook digital bookstore in tow.

    The question in the education segment is this: what does this new spinoff and the Microsoft investment mean for e-textbooks? In order to frame this question a bit more, let’s consider the current e-textbook market for a moment. (more…)

  • More on the Sakai/Jasig Merger

    As I have mentioned here before, the Sakai and Jasig foundations are in the process of evaluating a merger to create a kind of Apache Foundation for higher education. The new organization would be called the Apereo Foundation. The two communities will be voting on the merger some time in the next month or so. Documentation and discussion can be found here.

    I’d like to tell you why I think this merger is vitally important for higher education in general and Sakai in particular.

    (more…)

  • MOOCs: Two Different Approaches to Scale, Access and Experimentation

    In part 1 of this series, I described a new landscape of educational delivery models. In part 2 I described the master course concept and how it presents a cultural barrier that most traditional institutions cannot cross, at least without a dedicated online organization or an outsourced partnership.

    Why does it matter that we describe these educational delivery models with finer granularity than just traditional and online? Because the aims of the models differ, as do the primary methods of how these models are created and delivered.

    With all of the recent interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it would be worth summarizing the two branches of MOOCs including recent posts or interviews by the founders of the concept.

    Scale and Access

    In most online programs, at least those with more than few thousand students, the delivery method of this scale is the duplication of course sections in the manner of tract housing (for a better description, see part 2). But are there other methods to achieve scale (and therefore access) without duplicating sections? MOOCs represent an alternate approach where the actual course itself provides scale, allowing essentially unlimited enrollment in the single course section in the manner of a large apartment building.

    (more…)

  • Google Apps for Education: When Will It Replace the LMS?

    History professor Jonathan Rees called it an “uncharacteristically subtle post.” When he posted an excerpt from his university’s report on its Blackboard usage, he didn’t have to say much: “I think all I want to do here is point out that all the things professors use Blackboard for here most (as well as a few of the things that not many people use Blackboard for) can be done for a lot less money than whatever our Blackboard license costs. Sometimes they can be done for no money at all.”

    Rees asks a really important question: why would a school opt to spend so much money on an LMS when many of its features go unused? Why pay when you can find cheap or free alternatives elsewhere?

    (more…)

  • Online Learning, Startups, and Detective Fiction

    It’s always fun to remember those moments when a magic trick of some sort is explained to us. This happened to me several decades ago in, of all places, a course on Literary Theory, in which revealed the basic conceit of classic detective fiction. It seems that, for years, I had willingly been paying attention to the author’s elaborate patter and ignoring the obvious simplicity of the genre’s trick.

    In classic detective fiction there are only a few basic pieces that any author is allowed to use, and fair play dictates that an author may not introduce any new structural elements. The real difference between the masters and pretenders of the genre can be found in the way they employ, rearrange and manipulate these few essential narrative elements.1

    Over the years, I have been reminded of that lesson while observing different narrative forms played out across a variety of media. I have watched literary, film, and TV projects succeed because they understood the need to put the essential elements of their products together coherently, with the right and unique emphasis on each one. I have also watched many projects disappoint and fail utterly because too much attention was paid to only one element — special effects, characterization, or even story — without the proper treatment of other components. (more…)

  • We Interrupt This Program…

    e-Literate went down for few hours this afternoon due to somebody apparently hacking my account and using it for spam. It’s fixed now. Sorry.

  • The Blackboard Announcements, Part 2: Can Open Source Be Bought?

    I have gotten a lot of email from folks who moved to Moodle (often from Blackboard CE) because they wanted to get away from Blackboard and they thought that open source was “safe.” In my first post on the announcements, I noted there are reasons to believe that Moodlerooms customers may do just fine under the new corporate ownership. But still, what does the announcement mean? Did Blackboard buy Moodle? What about open source can be for sale? What protection does it afford from corporate acquisition, and what are the limits of those protections?

    I’ll try to outline some of the ins and outs in this post.

    (more…)