This is interesting. I have previously argued that, of Blackboard’s two mobile businesses, their LMS mobile business (a.k.a. Mobile Learn) is going to come under lots of pressure to get bundled with the platform as the competition does just that, while their mobile portal business (a.k.a. Mobile Central) is likely to be a viable business for at least the next few years. Desire2Learn apparently agrees, because they have just entered the mobile portal business. Their Campus Life product appears to be a direct competitor with Blackboard Mobile Central. Details are somewhat sparse (on both products, actually, but particularly on D2L’s), but I’ll write more about this as I learn more.
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.
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Global Trends in Education Costs?
I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with Rosa Maria Torres regarding Anya Kamenetz’s graph on the cost of higher education in the U.S. She made the fair point that the graph should be labeled so that readers know the data is for the United States (which I have now done). She also asserted that the trend is probably true for OECD countries in general but maybe not for others. Since it was Twitter, we couldn’t really have a full conversation about it, but her assertion makes me curious. First of all, I’d love to see comparative data on the costs of education over time for different geographical regions. But this wouldn’t really get at the heart of the matter, since many countries in the developing world are at very different points in the higher education adoption/diffusion curve than the developed world. So it’s hard to tell from a data snapshot whether some countries are on a different trajectory or just on a different place in the same trajectory.
What I’d like to know is whether there are alternative school funding models in the developing world that people believe are (a) likely to be sustainable based on an established track record and real data, and (b) avoid some of the structural features of Western (or Northern) educational institutions and funding mechanisms that lead to massive inflation.
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Why Higher Education Is In Trouble–In One Graph
Here’s a graph from a recent presentation by Anya Kamenetz:
U.S. Tuition Costs Over Time The word that comes to mind is “Yikes!”
Here’s the full preso:
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The iPad and the iLabs
There’s just so much to like about the LetterMPress project:
To begin with, I found it on KickStarter, a great site for crowd funding art projects that I learned about thanks to my friends at smARThistory. (There’s still one day left to donate to their project!) There’s something very satisfying about direct micro-funding of local projects that you believe in. My wife and I have been giving micro-lending gift certificates to friends and family via Kiva for years, and we’re probably going to fund our first classroom project on Donors Choose very soon.
Second, there’s the software. A direct manipulation interface that provides a high-fidelity simulation of the analog world is something that just sings on a touch-enabled device. Could you do something like this on a traditional computer using a mouse? Sure. But there’s something about touch, about transforming the screen into an object that you can manipulate with your own hands, that just seems new and fresh and powerful. In this case, it’s helping to keep alive an art that is in danger of being lost, and it’s doing so through a direct, physical interface with the art-making.
But the best part is that the digital interface, including the individual type elements, will be connected to a physical letterpress facility where people can have their digital letterpress creations transformed into real, honest-to-goodness letterpress-created analog art. It’s about as close as you can come to giving everybody their own physical letterpress. The approach reminds me of MIT’s iLabs, where students can have remote access to real lab facilities that are difficult and/or expensive to reproduce every place where you might have students that want to learn using the labs. Of course, one of the shortcomings of virtual labs is that students don’t gain the hands-on skills that they need to have in order to work in a real-life lab. I wonder whether a high-fidelity simulation on a touch interface would make a difference in terms of those skill deficits. It may turn out that touch will be much more important and useful than 3D in terms of creating high-value educational simulations. This would be particularly true in cases where the touch-based simulation could actually drive physical, real-world equipment so students could see the actual reality mirroring the virtual one. One other nice wrinkle to the LetterMPress implementation of this approach is that the simulation is only loosely coupled to the physical equipment. Students can practice and experiment as much as they want with their digital tools and submit their designs for real-world processing only when they’re ready.
So, to sum up, LetterMPress gives us the following:
- A high-fidelity, real-feeling simulation of an environment in which learners and practitioners can play
- The ability to run the simulation on rare and expensive physical equipment at a distance
- Through a combination of Kick-starter and an innovative business model, a way for individuals interested in preserving the art to make an investment that matters
Pretty cool.
If you’re interested in participating, you can donate to the LetterMPress KickStarter project. A donation of $25 gets you a copy of the app when it’s finished and a T-shirt.
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Interview with Lou Pugliese
For my first attempt at a Skype video interview, I was fortunate to be joined by Moodlerooms CEO Lou Pugliese. Unfortunately, the network gods were not with us; the picture is extremely fuzzy. But the audio is quite good and well worth your time. Lou is an interesting guy. He started out as a journalist, got into online learning early, was Blackboard’s first CEO, worked with VCs for a while, and now is leading one of the fastest growing open source LMS support vendors around.
On a related note, I’m in the process of doing some more research on the Moodlerooms/Cambridge University Press relationship. I was mistaken when I assumed that it was similar to the Blackboard/McGraw Hill deal. There are some interesting wrinkles to it, which I’ll report as soon as I have the details nailed down.
By the way, I’m looking for input on these interviews. Is an hour too long? Are you listening to the whole thing? Are there ways that I could make it more likely that you would? Making a podcasting feed available on iTunes, for example?
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ALT-J Gets New Name and Goes Open Access
This is just a quick note to say that the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (ALT) has renamed the ALT-J journal as Research in Learning Technology and is making it available open access. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and spend time with the latest issue but, given the general high quality that ALT tends to produce, I expect it to be pretty good.
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LMS Vendor/Textbook Publisher Partnerships
Today Moodlerooms announced a partnership with Cambridge Global Grid for Learning that allows faculty and students to access content from Cambridge University Press, Reuters, Corbis, and other content providers from within Moodlerooms’ Joule platform. As far as I can tell, this partnership is roughly similar to ones that Blackboard has previously announced with McGraw Hill and NBC. I expect to see more of these going forward, so it seems worthwhile to take a little time and look at the details of how these deals work for everybody.