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.

  • Moodle 2: File Import from and Export to Cloud Apps

    Gavin Henrick has a useful blog that publishes information about the ongoing development of Moodle 2. I was particularly interested in how Moodle will handle sharing files with consumer web apps like Google Docs and Flickr. Lucky for me, Gavin has a couple of screencasts covering the topic. Here’s some info about importing docs from external repositories:

    It’s a pretty intuitive UI that borrows heavily from desktop file picking interfaces. Moodle 2 integrates with an impressive list of external repositories:

    • YouTube
    • Alfresco
    • Box.net
    • Flickr
    • Google Docs
    • Mahara
    • MERLOT
    • Picasa
    • Remote Moodle installations
    • Amazon S3
    • WebDAV repositories
    • Wikimedia servers
    • File systems

    The repository API supports plugins for other repositories, so this list should grow over time.

    Moodle 2 also supports export to repositories in either HTML or LEAP2A format:

    This is also nicely done, but it doesn’t go far enough, in my view. A fundamental flaw in LMS design is that the course, rather than the student, owns course documents. While it’s great that Moodle makes it easy to export course contributions to places where students can hold onto them after the course gets archived, this mechanism relies on students making specific efforts to save their work. I would prefer to see a system in which the canonical copies of student-created course documents (or faculty-created course documents, for that matter) live in the users’ private file storage space and the course instance is granted permission to access them. By default, students hold onto all of their contributions after the course is archived.

    At any rate, if this is representative of the kind of improvement that is going into Moodle 2, it is likely to be an impressive release.

  • Digital Visitors and Digital Residents

    Thanks to Laura Czerniewicz for pointing me to this excellent video discussion by Oxford’s David White:

    This isn’t really a full-on replacement of Prensky’s concept of digital natives (which is unfortunate, since I agree Prensky tends to be reduced to “old people just don’t understand this stuff”), but I think it’s a useful formulation of the divide between people who get value out of social networks and those that don’t. The short version for those of you who don’t have time to watch the video (although it is well worth your 15 minutes) is that digital residents see the web as a social space while digital visitors see it as a collection of tools. This has pretty profound implications for the differences between whether and how these two groups use particular technologies.

    One of the more important points that David makes, in my view, is the link between your decision to be either a resident or a visitor and your ideology of education. If you believe that education is private affair between you, your books, and your professor, then you’re not likely to see the value of Facebook, Twitter, Elgg, or some other social networking platform in furthering your education. This actually links to another of David’s posts, “Does the Technology Matter,” in which he highlights two camps of instructional technologists: one that argues the technology should be transformational and the other that argues the technology should be invisible. It seems to me there’s a reason why there’s a high degree of overlap between people who are attracted to social networking, PLE’s and the like, and people who are interested in supplanting traditional pedagogies and institutions with more self-directed networked learning. Most people who fit David’s definition of a digital resident can probably remember their conversion experiences. For me, I had to be hit over the head several times. I used to think that blogging, Twitter, and Facebook were all idiotic, narcissistic wastes of time. (Well, OK, I still think Facebook is a kinda stupid.) In each case, I had a conversion experience in which I came to realize how the utility of the tool is not so much in what it enables me to do but in how it changes the way I want to be. I learned new behaviors and habits that I found to be productive and fulfilling. I learned to ask questions that I probably wouldn’t have asked otherwise, to reach out to more people more often for help, and to rely much more on the intelligence of my friends and colleagues to help me on my intellectual (and social) journey. These changes are intimately related to the ways in which we learn. I think it’s no surprise that people who are digital residents also tend to see technology as a catalyst of educational reform.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part V

    This is the fifth and final installment from our friends at the University of North Carolina:

  • DIY U: 'POP!' Goes the Bubble

    A while back, I suggested that there might be a bubble in the higher education market, and that students taking on large amounts of debt to go to non-elite schools could be analogous to sub-prime mortgage customers. Well, somebody else has picked up on the theme, and that somebody is none other than Steven Eisman, a hedge fund manager featured in The Big Short as one of the few people who made tons of money by betting against the housing market before it crashed. In particular, he is pointing to the for-profit education providers as the sub-prime lenders and claims that the bubble could pop if Congress tightens lending rules:

    “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry” said Eisman, 47, one of the sellers featured in “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (Norton, 2010), Michael Lewis’s book about investors who anticipated the housing bust. “I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.”…

    “Default rates are already starting to skyrocket,” Eisman said at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, in New York. “It’s just like subprime, which grew at any cost and kept weakening its underwriting standards to grow.”

    Just as bond-rating firms gave high grades to securities backed by risky mortgages, so the accrediting associations responsible for monitoring educational quality of for-profit colleges don’t provide thorough and independent scrutiny, said Eisman. Because accreditation is a peer-review system, in many instances representatives of for-profit colleges sit on the board of the body that certifies them, he said.

    The whole article is worth reading.

    “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry” said Eisman, 47, one of the sellers featured in “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (Norton, 2010), Michael Lewis’s book about investors who anticipated the housing bust. “I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.”

  • Lots of News in the IMS Standards World

    Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards.

    This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards:

    • Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the full draft is now ready for public review. I have written about this standard a few times before. Basically, it fixes many of the current problems with SIS/LMS integration and provides a more general means of provisioning class roster information into any application that needs it. LIS makes it easier for schools to move to support multiple LMSs, move to a different LMS, or make it easier for faculty and students to use non-LMS collaboration tools for classes. Expect more announcements about increased adoption of the standard in the coming months.
    • Basic Learning Tool Interoperability Finalized: This is a standard for proxying learning tools into your LMS/portal/PLE/whatever-unified-learning-environment-you-please. Think of Basic LTI as a lightweight, cross-platform answer to Blackboard Building Blocks/WebCT PowerLinks/Moodle Modules/whatever. Full LTI, which supports more complex use cases at the cost of a more complex implementation, is in the works.
    • Access For All 2.0 Finalized: AFA is an accessibility standard that has actually been around since 2003. However, it has since been submitted and adopted as an ISO standard and was modified significantly in the process. AFA 2.0 harmonizes the IMS standard with the ISO version of the standard.
    • Common Cartridge Adopted by Textbook Publishers to Support Tennessee Board of Regents: This is pretty big news. Standards generally don’t get traction unless customers demand that they be supported by their vendors. In this case, the Tennessee Board of Regents told the various textbook publishers that they expected course content for the high-enrollment general education requirements courses to be published in Common Cartridge format. Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, means the end of platform-specific course cartridges. It also potentially means that faculty migrating their courses from one system to another, either because they change schools or because their schools are changing LMSs, will have a much easier time of it. This latter bit will only happen if and when LMS platforms support Common Cartridge export, so be sure yo demand this from your vendor or your open source community.

  • Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

    Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

    Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

    This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

    Source: Taptu via GigaOm

    Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

    Source: The New York Times

    We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

    This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

    I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

  • The Coming Digital Textbook Wave

    Xplana has published some interesting growth projections on digital textbooks in the U.S. higher education market. If you’ve been frustrated by the slow adoption rate, then you’ll like what they have to say. First of all, and unsurprisingly, they see the proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., the iPad and other tablets, netbooks, smart phones, etc.) as one of the drivers of the change. As I have written here before, I believe the lack of a ubiquitous form factor that works well for eBooks has been a very serious limiting factor on the growth of digital textbooks in general and OERs in particular. But here’s the passage of the report that really caught my eye:

    Current product publishing and finance forecasting within textbook publishing are based on traditional models of print textbooks sales. Viable textbook projects are generally required to have projected revenues of at least 6X plant costs in order to justify company investment. Within this traditional model, digital textbook sales are currently counted as incremental volume, or as added revenue (again, incremental to print), when bundled with a course cartridge or internal assessment solution.

    Once digital textbook sales reach 13%, however, the finance model breaks down significantly as digital textbooks are no longer incremental and, instead, actually begin to pirate print sales deeply (6.5% decrease in revenue on the average title). When digital textbooks sales reach 20% of new textbook sales, based on current production and revenue models, textbook publishers will see a 10% decrease in revenues and a 13% decrease in project margin. At this point, publishers will have little choice but to change product, production and distribution strategies in favor of digital versus print.

    Impact of Digital Text Sales on Print RevenuesTextbook publishers shoehorn their digital textbook sales into a pretty traditional revenue model. It’s an afterthought rather than a main driver, and it usually gets treated that way. But there is a tipping point. Once digital textbooks begin to cannibalize a surprisingly low percentage of traditional print sales (13%), then the traditional revenue model for textbooks starts to fall apart quickly. At that point (which the Xplana authors project to hit some time in 2014),  expect the textbook publishers to become a lot more aggressive about eTextbooks if they haven’t already. It will be life or death for them then.

    But that’s not the end of their worries:

    Currently, textbook publisher production models are based on print workflows. Digital textbooks are created at the end of the production cycle when compositors create final production-ready files. As sales of digital textbooks begin to cannibalize print sales, and as their inevitable future as the replacement of print textbooks becomes more apparent, publishers will be forced to alter current production workflows to favor a digital-first process with POD available from XML files and templates.

    Textbook publishers have production models that are optimized for producing—wait for it—textbooks. Many of them are going to have to retool their processes in order to make their costs manageable when their main product is digital.

    It’s not all bad news for them, though. Even though the costs of the digital textbooks will significantly lower than paper textbooks, the publishers may make up the revenues by “renting” the textbooks via some form of DRM. Basically, it will kill the used textbook market, which hurts their sales badly within a couple years of producing a book and forces them to invent reasons to create new editions in order to keep selling. Students, in turn get lower prices for assets that they usually don’t want to own after the end of the semester anyway. Prices will come down for this reason alone. Add to that the increased competition from new entrants, including but not limited to OERs, and there should be significant downward price pressure on college textbook costs in the next five years. Given that the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that textbooks and supplies account for 72% of the cost of a 2-year college education, that’s a pretty important change.

    Update: You can find the GAO report here.