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.

  • Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean?

    After Blackboard’s recent earnings announcement and conference call, Jim Farmer and I had a chat about what we learned. One thing that struck us both was that Blackboard’s total number of LMS license customers is declining. Jim, being handy with Excel, put this chart together:

    Blackboard's Total LMS Licenses

    There is a clear long-term trend toward reduced number of total LMS licenses. Furthermore, Blackboard reported a slight decline (by three licenses, compared with a gain of 45 licenses in the same quarter of the previous year) of Enterprise licenses from last quarter to this quarter. At the same time, they are still hitting their revenue and profit numbers, and they have not guided analyst expectations lower. So what’s really going on here?

    As is often the case when analyzing the data from publicly traded companies, the answers aren’t entirely clear. I have some thoughts, though, which I’m happy to share. Before I do, I want to thank Blackboard Vice President, Investor Relations & Global Treasury Michael Stanton, who was as helpful and forthcoming as he is legally allowed to be under SEC regulations in answering follow-up questions that I sent to him on the topic.

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  • Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc.

    UPDATE: With his permission, we have appended an email response by LSU CIO Brian D. Voss in the comments section of this post.

    On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

    Because their process was public, we have access to valuable details that are not often available for institutional decisions such as this one.

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  • My Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards

    Since I have urged all of you to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2007 Edublog Awards (or “Eddies”), I figured I should put my (virtual) money where my (virtual) mouth is and put some of my own nominees on the table. So here are mine:

    Best Individual Blog: Cole Camplese and Seb Schmoller. The reason for both is the same; I find that I actually read and learn from a very high percentage of posts on both blogs. If I only have time to look at a couple of edublogs on a busy day, these are the two that I’ll check for new posts first.

    Best Group Blog: Terra Incognita.  Ken Udas has done a fantastic job of assembling a large and impressive group of guest bloggers on the topics of open source and open educational resources.

    Best New Blog: Terra Incognita again and Mara Hancock’s Promptu. In addition to the fact that she writes about a very important topic (user experience for educational software), I just enjoy Mara’s writing style.

    Best Blogged Research Paper or Project: The eLearning Maturity Model (eMM) on Stephen Marshall’s blog. eMM is one of the most interesting and, frankly, useful ongoing research projects into educational technology adoption and Stephen’s blog covers it admirably well. Also, like many of the others on this list, Stephen is an excellent writer (which is one of the reasons that I had him as a guest blogger on e-Literate).

    Best Educational Tech Support Blog: As Much By Writing. This isn’t the place where you necessarily will go to get your ed tech support, but it is a model for how university IT departments should be augmenting their ed tech support to their campuses via a blog.

    Best eLearning/Corporate Blog: e-Clippings. I feel a little funny nominating in this category since I’ve been out of the corporate side of things long enough that I don’t have a clear sense of what is most useful in that field anymore. But Mark Oehlert’s blog is one of the few on the corporate side that I still read and enjoy on a regular basis. It’s just plain interesting.

    Best Educational use of Video/Visuals: MyGermanClass.com. Hilarious vodcasts of high school German lessons. I don’t speak a word of German and yet I find them strangely compelling.

    OK, that’s it for me–for now, at least. Now it’s your turn.

  • Nominations Are Open for the Edublog Awards

    Every year I am impressed with the effort and quality of results from the Edublog Awards crew. Every year I learn about at least a few edublogs that teach me something important. With nominations now open for the 2007 awards, I urge you to participate. Start by nominating those edublogs that you learn from. Try to include any worthy but relatively unknown edublogs; even if they don’t get the award, at least they’ll get more attention as nominees. I’m talking about making a small community-building effort that pays substantial dividends.

    Please go nominate.

  • Google Announces Open(er) Social Software APIs

    As many have anticipated, Google has announced its OpenSocial platform, a set of APIs that allow developers to target multiple social software platforms.

    As you might imagine, there’s already a lot of good coverage of this on the web, and I’m going to just provide some highlights here:

    From TechCrunch:

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  • My New Post on Terra Incognita

    I have an article up today on Terra Incognita. If you haven’t checked this blog out yet, I highly recommend that you do. Managed by Penn State World Campus’s Executive Director Ken Udas, the blog features a series of guest posts by various interesting folks on topics related to open source and open educational resources for higher education.

    Anyway, my piece uses the analysis of Yochai Benkler to explain how it is that open source works from an economic perspective. I had intended to get into all kinds of nuances, such as the implications for aspects of open source projects such as modularity, transparency, license choice, patents, etc., but the post would have been way too long. As it was, I’m not sure that I even managed to capture the basics of his ideas in a compelling way.

    Oh well. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post sometime.

  • An Open Casket After All

    Update: The intrepid Jim Farmer has also posted a copy of the D2L entry in the immagic eLibrary.

    As it turns out, one of your fellow e-Literate readers saved the D2L post and pasted it into the comments section of my last post.

    I love you guys.