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.

  • Future Trends Forum on Thursday

    Future Trends Forum on Thursday

    On Thursday, June 29th at 2pm EDT I will be participating in a Future Trends Forum discussion with Bryan Alexander. The topic will be the LMS Market and the future of learning platforms. The Future Trends Forum uses the Shindig platform and is designed to allow active conversations and not just Bryan interviewing his guests.

    Each week a different guest – an inspiring expert, visionary, practitioner, or researcher – speaks to their area of interest. I kick off the discussion with a question or two, then facilitate further questions and comments generated by participants via text, video, and Twitter. And discussion is the name of the game, as we avoid PowerPoint and encourage the entire audience to actively engage.

    We’d love to see you join us. You can RSVP at this page (I’m the Tom Hanks at the beginning of Castaway; Bryan is the one whose best friend is Wilson) – give your name and email, and you get a reminder and link to event. No downloads needed.

  • Whither Moodle?

    Whither Moodle?

    On e-Literate and even more so with our LMS market analysis service, we have called out many times the broad dominance of Moodle in terms of active installations worldwide. In every region outside of North America (US and Canada), Moodle has largest market share by far, and it is second place in North America.

    But the trajectory of Moodle new implementations (higher education degree-granting institutions moving from another LMS to Moodle as the primary LMS) is striking, especially in the US and Canada as seen below, with Moodle highlighted (all data is from our partner LISTedTECH). (Update: Image link fixed – wasn’t showing in some areas)

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  • The Case for Learning Platform Grade Book

    The Case for Learning Platform Grade Book

    A little while back, I wrote a post reflecting on how close we are to getting a next-generation, modular learning platform and how the next steps in the IMS standards-making process can influence whether and when we might actually see this elusive beast in the wild. Today, I’d like to zero in on what I believe is the next logical step, given the current state of the ecosystem: namely, making LMS grade books fully interoperable with courseware and other ed tech tools.

    No, it isn’t sexy. No, it won’t revolutionize education. But I believe that it will benefit vendors and educators alike in a way that will shift relationships among ed tech tools, reduce wasted effort reinventing the wheel, and open up new design possibilities.

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  • Digital Badges Are Gaining Traction

    Digital Badges Are Gaining Traction

    One trend that struck me as new at the recent IMS Global and ASU/GSV conferences was a ramping up of activity around digital badges. At the moment, they seem to be filling in cracks that more formal credentials don’t cover. While there are some efforts to convert formal certificates and (more rarely) degree programs into stackable micro-credentials, those activities are mostly happening around the edges at the moment.

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  • A Flexible, Interoperable Digital Learning Platform: Are We There Yet?

    A Flexible, Interoperable Digital Learning Platform: Are We There Yet?

    In 2005, some colleagues and I had been tasked with identifying a single LMS that could serve the needs of all 64 campuses of the State University of New York—from Adirondack Community College to SUNY Stony Brook to the two medical schools. We came to the conclusion that no single LMS at the time could meet such diverse needs. We proposed instead that SUNY should build a modular system from which each campus, and indeed each educator, could create their own fit-for-purpose digital learning environment. We called this idea the Learning Management Operating System, or LMOS.

    We were neither the first nor the last group of people to propose such an idea. We had been preceded by e-Learning Framework, which had been put forth by the UK’s Joint Information Services Committee (Jisc) a year or two earlier. In 2012, Phil wrote about the idea of  Learning Platform here on e-Literate. In 2015, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) started promoting the idea of a Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE).

    There are some conceptual and implementation differences among these different formulations, but they share two things in common. First, they all posited that contemporary learning environments were insufficiently flexible to meet a diverse range of teaching and learning needs. Second, none of them have been implemented. An upcoming issue of EDUCAUSE Review will focus on NGDLE, in part to try to build momentum for it. I have contributed an article.

    Nearly a decade and a half after the idea of some kind of modular learning environment surfaced, why hasn’t it happened yet? How close are we? What are the barriers? Having recently returned from IMS Global’s annual Learning Impact meeting, I am convinced that we are closer than ever. But how quickly the remaining barriers fall and how well the end result works will depend heavily on what happens next in the standards-making process.

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  • Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education (BNED) announced today that they have a deal with Unizin to provide predictive analytics services through the LoudSight platform to the consortium’s member universities. As covered by Inside Higher Ed:

    BNED, as the company now likes to be called, operates nearly 1,500 bookstores, but has in recent years expanded beyond course materials. In March 2016, it acquired the software start-up LoudCloud, and it is through that company that BNED now will score a group of 22 potential new clients (or, in the cases where it already runs campus bookstores, form tighter connections with existing ones) that includes Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University and the State University System of Florida, among others.

    The deal represents a new product focus for BNED’s LoudCloud – predictive analytics – and a new financial model for Unizin. (more…)

  • State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition

    State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition

    This is the ninth year I have shared the LMS market share graphic, commonly known as the squid graphic, for US and Canadian higher education. The original idea remains – to give a picture of the LMS market in one page, highlighting the story of the market over time. The key to the graphic is that the width of each band represents the percentage of institutions using a particular LMS as its primary system.

    Last year we made a big shift based on our LMS market analysis service – we are working with LISTedTECH to provide market data and visualizations. This data source provides historical and current measures of institutional adoptions, allowing new insights into how the market has worked and current trends. Our spring report for subscribers will be released this month. Data for 2017 goes through April 1 of this year.

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