There’s been a lot of buzz (some positive and some negative) about Apple’s iTunes University. I’m pleased to say that I will be traveling with a number of SUNY colleagues to 1 Infinite Loop the week after next, where we will hear more about the program. I promise to blog about what I learn. In the meantime, I’d like to sketch out an idea that Patrick Masson and I have been batting around about how iTunes U could fit into an LMOS. (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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Why Mashups Make the LMOS
Regular readers know that I’ve been flogging the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) pretty hard. The other day, LMOS partner-in-crime Patrick Masson and I published an article about the need to make LMS’s mash-up-friendly. Well, today, ZDNet editor David Berlind effectively connects the dots between the article and the LMOS concept. (more…)
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Two New Articles in e-Learn
I just had two new articles published in e-Learn Magazine. The first one, A Call to Arms, is an opinion piece arguing that we urgently need more direct faculty-technologist collaboration in LMS design if we are to make any kind of reasonable progress. The second one, which I co-authored with my colleague Patrick Masson, is an attempt to lead by example. In Unbolting the Chairs: Making Learning Management Systems More Flexible, we pair up as a teacher and a technologist to argue for changes in LMS design that would facilitate better support of the long tail of learning applications.
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More Corroborating Info on Cost of Sales
Mark Carden makes an interesting observation that supports Jim Farmer’s calculations regarding Blackboard’s cost of sales:
I know something about the cost of sales issue, having sold library automation software for most of the past ten years (at Innovative and Dynix). I have long said that it costs the major ILS/LMS vendors an average of about US$50,000 per bid, which means that for a typical mid-sized university deal, five competing bidders will spend US$250,000 between them: and only one will win, so again that is US$250,000 per deal.
Of course an individual vendor’s costs per deal are very dependent on the win-rate, something Jim has not really looked into.
As a deal like this might only have revenues of US$250,000 anyway, it means the library community has paid US$250,000 to the library software vendors and none of this has gone into development � it was all spent on sales and marketing.
It is in everyone’s interest to lower that $50K per-bid cost of entry. Following up on my earlier post, Ken Udas and I have been participating on a thread on the OpenBRR forum. If you have an interest in the topic, please feel free to join in.
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More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"
Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most important part:
Software suppliers do not spend on sales and marketing not considered ?necessary.? The costs are driven by customer demands and customer expectations. Enterprise procurements can be very expensive for software suppliers. Requiring extensive proposal responses, large-scale demonstrations using extensive prescribed scripts, and presentations with experts drawn throughout the company are required by customers as a condition of doing business; this is costly.
Blackboard spends a ton of money to acquire each new customer because they have to. It’s the only way they can successfully run the gauntlet of the higher education sales process often enough to make money. The procurement process itself is broken. It requires proprietary vendors to spend between a quarter and a third of their revenue on sales–money that could be better spent on product development or discounts to customers. It blocks Open Source support vendors that don’t have armies of salespeople from participating in many RFP’s. And, according to Jim’s analysis, it results in a net price increase of as much as 26% for the customers. Everybody loses.
The good news is that this problem is fixable.
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Blackboard by the Numbers
Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive credentials across the board, including having served as the CIO for the Cal State University system. You can find his full bio here.
Sorry I’ve been incommunicado for a while. There’s been lots of stuff going on, both professionally and personally (including a new grandbaby).
Anyway, I’m going to make it up to you with a special treat. Jim Farmer has a fantastic analysis of how much it costs Blackboard to make a sale, what that means to their overall business model, and how that compares to the cost-per-sale of a commercially marketed open source software product and the cost for community-building the Open Source uPortal project. Some of it may be slow going if you’re not familiar with financial analysis, so I’m going to unpack a few of the good parts and speculate a bit on the implications.
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For the Sakai curious, sakaitestdrive.com
Unicon and Optimized Learning just announced Sakai Test Drive: (more…)