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 We Don’t Know About Learning Analytics

    Long-time e-Literate readers know that I have been a fan of the concept of learning analytics for a number of years now. But it became apparent at this year’s Learning Impact conference that learning analytics are the new hotness. Everybody is talking about them, and increasing numbers of vendors (LMS vendors, ERP vendors, textbook vendors, etc.) are trying to figure out how to get in on the party.

    Which means it’s probably time to start asking some critical questions about how well we really understand learning analytics and where the potential for failure and disappointment might be.

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  • Notes on the IMS Learning Impact Conference

    This year’s Learning Impact conference was the best attended that I can remember. The conference is also getting closer to what I would consider to be a healthy balance between vendors and university folks. This post is going to hit some quick standards news items that emerged out of the conference. I will follow up with a separate post on my musings regarding learning analytics that were inspired by a panel discussion.

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  • Software Patent Wars: Is Linux next?

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic inc. and contributor to Intellectual Property Magazine.

    It was sunny day, 76 degrees, in Tyler, Texas on April 15th, 2011 when the jury foreman handed the single page decision to Judge Davis, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas [EDTX]. There were three questions and the jury’s answers. Did Google infringe Bedrock’s two patents? Yes. Were the patents invalid? No. How much did the jury award in damages? The jury “ordered Google to pay $5 million in damages for infringing a Linux-related patent held by Texas-based Bedrock Computer Technologies.”

    Bedrock Computer Technologies is a non-practicing entity, sometimes called a patent troll, which seeks license revenue for patents in their portfolio.

    Amy Miller wrote in Corporate Counsel:

    Bedrock had sued Google in 2006, along with Yahoo, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL, alleging infringement of a Linux-related patent filed in January 1997. The patent describes “a method and apparatus for performing storage and retrieval,” and Bedrock said the companies had infringed it by using versions of the Linux operating system kernel on their servers. Bedrock has also asked for an injunction, but the court has not ruled on that yet.

    Because of its wide use of the Linux operating system, the key words are “Linux-related patent.”

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  • Desire2Learn Product Updates

    I had a chance to speak to some folks about their latest product release (9.2) a couple of weeks back and am only now finding time to blog about it.

    First, there’s what they’re doing with the LMS itself. No surprise, one of their areas of focus is on user experience improvement, with reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform tasks being a prominent item on the agenda. Pretty much all the LMS developers are working on this right now. One fundamental problem with LMS design in general has always been that it’s a Swiss army knife. Everything is crammed into it. That’s not a recipe for great usability. On top of that, the fundamental user experience architecture of all these platforms is now about a decade old. It’s built in the model of enterprise groupware circa 2000, when people are increasingly expecting an experience consistent with Web 2.0 software circa 2010. So a facelift is in order. A second thing they are doing is embedding audio recording wherever attachments can be done in the UI. Ubiquitous audio and video recording are going to be pretty much required in an LMS platform within a year or two.

    But beyond that, D2L is putting a lot of effort to fine tune their rubric, learning objective, selective release, assessment, and content modules to make it easier for schools to move in the direction of competency modeling and adaptive learning. This is not an easy path for an institution to follow, so D2L is putting a lot of care into lowering the barriers, both by making it easy to approach the problem piecemeal (e.g., no longer requiring learning objectives in order to use rubrics) while simultaneously making it easy to add new pieces once you’ve started (e.g., enabling selective release to trigger off of rubric scores). To my mind, this web that D2L is weaving could be their compelling functional differentiator. Time will tell.

    We also talked about the company’s mobile strategy. D2L has no less than three mobile products now. The first, Desire2Learn 2Go, is a native app that links to the LMS. Right now it is Blackberry-only. 2Go is the company’s consumer-oriented product, which they envision being downloaded by students directly from smart phone app stores. Desire2Learn Mobile Web is essentially their browser-based product that fills roughly the same needs as 2Go, i.e., it’s mainly student learning-oriented. And finally their new product, Desire2Learn Campus Life, is a mobile campus portal that competes with Blackboard’s Mobile Central. It supports pushing a variety of apps—campus calendar, campus news, dining hall info, sports info, etc.—to mobile apps for Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This release is focused on getting pre-built functionality out the door, while next release will be more about delivering an SDK so that campuses can develop their own apps. When I asked D2L about what their differentiators are vis-a-vis Mobile Central, their answer was basically “stay tuned.” The mobile campus portal space is quickly becoming crowded with players like SunGard getting into the game and the Jasig community announcing the start of the uMobile initiative, so it should be interesting to watch.

    Finally, my old friend Al Essa, former Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and former CIO of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, will be heading up the development of D2L’s analytics product. Al is a deep thinker who has been focused on learning analytics for the past couple of years. I look forward to seeing what he can cook up in the next year or two.

    My talk with D2L happened before their announcement about acquiring a lecture capture hardware and software product suite, so I don’t have anything new to add regarding that development at the moment.

  • The Blackboard/Moodle FOIA Requests

    Vicki Tambellini is reporting that a number of colleges who moved from Blackboard to Moodle are getting hit with Freedom of Information Act requests:

    Last week a number of institutions received FOIA requests from a law firm in Columbia, South Carolina.  The firm requests everything related to individual LMS procurements from the RFP process through the implementation.According to the letter I read,  Schmidt Copeland wants information that includes everything from procurement notes and evaluation materials to RFP responses in procurements where Blackboard was replaced by Moodle solutions.  The firm leaves no request unmentioned:  communications with vendors, consultants and recordings.  They want post-selection operating information including staffing, budgets and communications including trouble tickets.

    The request includes system loss, performance and up-time data requests.  Oh, and they’d like it in 10 days, please.  And in a less than subtle statement, the firm reminds the institution that if they don’t comply, it’s a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $750!

    I can confirm that at least one school in my area has received such a request.

    So what is this about?

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  • The Changing Dynamics of the Educational Technology Markets

    Phil Hill has two good blog posts up in response to Blackboard’s announcement that it has received at least two “unsolicited non-binding proposals” for the company to be acquired. In his first post, Phil argues that, whatever the outcome of the bidding, Blackboard’s brand value will be hurt:

    In one dramatic shift, Blackboard has gone from the known to the unknown.  For years, one of Blackboard’s greatest sales strength was the message that it was here to stay.  Unlike that pesky Desire2Learn, who might succumb to lawyer’s bills and the patent fight, Blackboard was a solid investment with the corporate muscle to be here for the long haul.  Unlike those pesky open source providers, who might disappear or stop developing, Blackboard presented “one throat to choke” and was reliable.  Now, can anyone reliably guess what’s going to happen to Blackboard, who will provide services, whether the roadmap will completely change?

    This sales advantage is now gone.

    I’m somewhat agonistic on this point. I see Phil’s argument, but the size of the impact may be significantly different depending on whether the acquirer somebody like McGraw Hill, somebody like News Corp., or if no acquisition comes through (which I think is the most likely scenario). I don’t have a strong gut feeling about how much this changes the sales conversation.

    In his second post, Phil takes issue with one of my previous posts:

    Michael is right and you should read the whole post and its second part, but I have a different opinion on the conclusions.  I agree with the conclusions that…

    by 2014 we may see it beginning to change the whole picture for educational technology infrastructure in some fundamental ways. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be an interesting ride.,

    but I am less inclined to rely on straight-line projections of market data to look ahead, and am more inclined to think the market changes we are seeing are driven by outside forces with potentially nonlinear effects.  Rome may have been weakened from within, but when real change happened, the Visigoths made it happen….

    Today, there is a flood of new money into the educational technology market.  In addition to the potential acquisition of Blackboard, Instructure just raised $8M in venture funding and vying for the role of Alaric in their marketing position, Pearson has been heavily investing in Learning Studio (eCollege for you old-timers), and Moodlerooms raised $7+M in venture funding.  Publishing companies, ERP vendors, private equity, venture funding – these are major disruptive forces.  And there is still significant moves being made by technology companies such as Google.

    Whatever happens with the potential acquisition of Blackboard, expect to see a different market emerge, with new dynamics.  For higher education institutions – is your academic technology strategy ready to handle the changes in the market?

    I’m not sure that we actually disagree. I also believe that there are some pretty massive changes taking place in the educational technology markets. The only question I would raise is whether those changes will hit quickly enough to substantially change the likely outcome of the evaluations that WebCT and ANGEL customers are going to have to complete in the next 24 months.

    Let’s dig into the details a little and see what we can figure out.

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  • Moodlerooms and the Cambridge Global Grid for Learning

    I know it’s been a little quiet here on e-Literate since I started gearing up for my (awesome) new job. Posts are likely to be sporadic for a while longer yet. But fear not, Dear Reader, for I have not forgotten you. I do have a backlog of posts that I intend to get to whenever I can squeeze out some time.

    I’m going to start with a topic that’s been in my queue for some time now. A while back, I wrote a post comparing Moodlerooms’ content deal with Cambridge University Press to Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. It turns out that my assumptions about that deal were wrong. This matters for several reasons. First, I take pride in giving you accurate information, and in this case I didn’t. But beyond that, the nature of these deals can tell us a lot both about the shifting landscape of the relationships between LMS providers and publishers as well as the growth of new sustainability models for educational content. Both of these dynamics will be important to watch.

    Cambridge Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) is a new and somewhat experimental division of Cambridge University Press. They refer to themselves as “digital content brokers.” They aggregate content from about 40 different providers, such as Reuters and Corbis. They then hand curate the content, weeding out items that aren’t appropriate (their current target market is primary and secondary, although they have plans for higher and further education) and tag it in ways that will make it easier for teachers to find. The assets are pretty granular, so articles and images and videos rather than whole courses. But all items in the collection have been copyright cleared for use in courses. GGfL has plans to begin pulling OERs into their collection as well, thus providing a single portal for finding free and fee content.

    Pricing is relatively cheap. Right now, a high school can license their entire library for $1,795 USD. Their current model is one license for everything, but they eventually want to provide license options by collection or even by asset, and they want to link the content to metadata on learning outcomes. And contrary to my earlier reporting, their deal with Moodlerooms is quite different than Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. According to Tom Murdock, Moodlerooms’ co-founder and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms customers will all have access to a basic GGfL subscription bundled with their Moodlerooms support contract, with the option to upgrade their GGfL contract for a fee. In return, GGfL will promote Moodlerooms to their customers who may be looking for an LMS. Unlike the Blackboard/MGH deal, which is essentially a portal deal in which MGH pays Blackboard for access to their customers, the Moodlerooms/GGfL deal is a cross-selling partnership. No money is actually changing hands between the two companies.