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.

  • The Future of Open Learning Content Hinges on Ease of Use

    Let’s start off with the obvious. OERs, open textbooks, and other open content have never had more public support or momentum. State governments, universities, and organizations are all upping their openness game in an effort to combat the rising costs of education.

    Here are just a few examples of the open learning content momentum:

    And this is only the tip of the open learning content iceberg. In addition to the plethora or organized OER and open textbook projects there are also thousands of individual instructors and teachers creating openly licensed learning content.

    Yet, even the movement’s biggest proponents know that simply showing up with free content won’t lead to broad usage in the K-12 or Higher Education sectors. David Wiley points out that open content currently has no answer for “the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers.” Others have made similar arguments and talk about the silted nature of open learning content. In my new book, The Future of Learning Content, I list several shortcomings that the OER and open textbook communities need to overcome in order for open learning content to revolutionize the US education landscape: (more…)

  • Apple is Playing the Long Game with iBooks 2 and iTunesU App

    When Apple made the iBooks Author / iBooks2 / iTunesU app announcement on January 19th, there were many arguments for and against their implied educational market strategy. In the educational technology community, two of the most intense arguments why Apple’s move was faulty, or even harmful, came down to the cost and availability of iPads in education. The source of the problems was that Apple made their products wholly dependent on iPad usage.

    • The iPad costs ~$500 or more, making the cost benefits of $15 textbooks almost a moot point – with a higher cost of ownership than even traditional paper textbooks.
    • For real pedagogical benefits, all students in a course or program would need to have an iPad – since most students don’t have these tablets, the only way to solve would be one-to-one school purchases for students.

    There are other arguments to be made against Apple’s strategy, but I want to focus on these two inter-related problems.

    With the disclosure of two remarkable facts and one price break during the new iPad announcement, it is becoming apparent that Apple is playing the long game with their educational strategy, planning to address the problems of cost and availability over time rather than trying to win the argument with today’s numbers. Watch the trends, not the snapshot of today.

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  • Cengage Learning: It Gets Better

    I don’t always agree with my employer’s political stances, but this is one that makes me proud:

    Thanks to Jane Snyder for pointing this out to me.

  • Social Learning Tools Are Fine, But Not Critical For All Educational Models

    We are in a high point of investment and interest in the application of technology to innovate education, and a lot of attention has been paid to the new class of learning platforms that have social tools at the center of the platform design – think Instructure, Coursekit, OpenClass, etc. I have written about several new solutions and how they could disrupt our traditional LMS markets. However, the discussions about the potential of different learning platforms too often ignore some key differences in the models of education that are the targets for educational technology. One result is that some systems are often dismissed out of hand for not having any real social or collaboration tools – think the new iTunesU app or Khan Academy.

    There is a big divide, in my opinion, between the application of technology to support and improve traditional models of education and the application of technology to create or enable new models of education. Whether social and collaboration features are critical depends on the educational model, not on the technology available.

    Improving Traditional Education

    In this case, the role of educational technology is to bring the benefits of technical features of social, mobile, big data, consumerization, etc to the classroom model that has existed for hundreds of years. The obvious example is bringing learning platforms and other tools to improve how well students learn in a classroom setting. I would include in this model the goals of the flipped classroom as well as online courses designed by individual faculty members. In all these cases, the usage of technology is to reduce the administrative burden, make the best usage of classroom time, and supporting pedagogical designs of the class. The technology replicates – hopefully in a compelling manner – the traditional role of tranmitting information, cohort-based learning and interaction, self-assessment such as quizzes, and official assessments such as tests and grading.

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  • Great Title, Flawed Post – Khan Academy Enables Out-of-the-Box Approaches

    There was a very interesting article at Huffington Post today that I suspect is rapidly making the rounds through the blogosphere. Given the author and title of the post, “What Silicon Valley Executives Keep Getting Wrong About Education” by Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, I had high hopes for an insightful explanation of mistakes by ed tech executives. While the investment exemplified by Silicon Valley has great potential to improve education, there clearly is a lack of understanding by much of the investment and technology industries about how education works.

    The summation of Dr. Devlin’s argument is that Silicon Valley is not listening to the right people to understand K-12 education.

    When it comes to making important business decisions, they will regularly seek the advice of domain experts, often at considerable cost in consulting fees, but they fail to recognize the equal importance of domain expertise in education.

    The rest of the post is an argument that in a TechCrunch post Vinod Khosla showed his ignorance of education expertise by citing Khan Academy as an example of many “out-of-the-box approaches”. I have no problem with the use of anecdotes to illustrate a point, but I do have a problem with the logic of this argument.

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  • My UnKeynote

    NERCOMP is holding an unconference on the LMS in Worcester, MA on March 5th. I will be delivering the unkeynote on the unLMS. Since it is an unkeynote, I will tell the audience nothing important about the LMS, instead relying on them to have more of the answers than I do.

    In other words, it’s a lot like a regular keynote, only we’re more honest about it.

  • Guest Blog at WCET: Institutional Decision-Making and Changing LMS Market

    Today I had a guest post at WCET’s blog. WCET is a great organization that “accelerates the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education”. They have been leaders in sharing best practices for online education, including taking a leading role on explaining State Authorization regulations as well as others. You can read the full post here.

    The topic of the post is how the changing LMS / Learning Platform market is, or should be, changing institutional decision-making.

    We have seen a great deal of change in the higher education Learning Management System (LMS) market over the past year, as has been described in several blog posts. One of the biggest changes to the market that I’ve noticed is that we seem to be moving from an enterprise LMS market, with full-featured monolithic systems, into a learning platform market, with many cloud-based platforms that don’t attempt to have all the features in one system.

    As Ritchie Boyd has described, the WCET LMS Common Interest Group (CIG) is recasting itself this year as “the ‘Beyond the LMS’ Common Interest Group. The idea is to not ignore the LMS, but rather to acknowledge that there is so much more going on in the broader academic technology ecosystems and their impact on our campuses, and that much of this activity often includes or is enveloped by the formal LMS.”

    In last year’s WCET-sponsored Managing Online Education survey, 47% of respondents indicated they are reviewing their LMS strategy and 27% are planning to change LMS within 2 years. A key question arises, however, about how institutions should adapt their technology decision-making processes based on these market changes. It’s all well and good for the market to change and provide more choices and new approaches, but how should schools decide which system(s) best fit their specific academic and administrative needs? The emergence of new, often free, cloud-based learning platforms may require changes to our decision-making.

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