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.
Yesterday morning Barnes & Noble Education, the owner of 743 college bookstores and related services, announced the acquisition of LMS provider LoudCloud Systems for $17.9 million in cash. LoudCloud provides a traditional LMS for general higher education and K-12 needs, and they are best known for their customer Grand Canyon University, a for-profit provider and partial investor. LoudCloud from the beginning touted a modular approach to learning management systems, and one of their key modules is LoudBooks, an “adaptive and social” eReader of digital course materials. More recently, LoudCloud entered the competency-based education (CBE) market by releasing FASTRAK, an LMS specifically designed for CBE programs.
According to LISTedTECH data, LoudCloud is used in a half dozen colleges and university accounts in the US, although these are mostly for-profits with multiple campuses.
I have long heard discussions that LoudCloud was looking for an exit, so the acquisition of the company is not a surprise, per se. But why Barnes & Noble Education? I think that timing of the announcement helps answer that question.
A while back, I wrote a rant about why LMSs fail to evolve. It got some…notoriety. Since Phil and I are now writing a bi-weekly column for the Chronicle‘s new Re:Learning section, I thought I’d try trimming down the piece and rewriting it for a general audience. It was an interesting exercise. On e-Literate, we have the luxury of writing pieces that are as long as we want them to be and of assuming that our audience is pretty knowledgeable about a wide range of tech issues. We can also choose to target different subgroups of our audience with each post. Honestly, there have been times when I’ve written a post that was primarily intended to persuade one (influential) person, although I always try to make my posts interesting to a broader range of people. When we write for the Chronicle, we are always writing for a broad audience of non-techies, and we have to keep our ideas small and focused enough that we can adequately express them in 1500 words or less. But to the degree that we succeed, we have an opportunity to be ambassadors for ed tech issues to broader academia.
Since many of you play that role of ambassador every day, I’d be grateful for your feedback. If you have a moment, please go read the article at the Chronicle and then come back here and comment on it. Did I pick the right aspects of the issue to focus on? Do you think this piece would resonate with your campus stakeholders? Would it be helpful to you in your conversations at work?
As many of you know, Phil and I have been exploring the topic of “personalized learning” for the past year, trying to figure out what the heck it means and what it’s really good for, separate from the hype. We’ve boiled down the idea into the beginnings of a framework, which we’ve just had published in EDUCAUSE Review. The central focus is to think of “personalized learning” as a set of technology-supported teaching practices that un depersonalize teaching. While we’re exploring that, we also dive into the question of why hype happens, why the hype cycle exists, and how we can try to kill it.
Chegg, which is in the midst of a dramatic change in their business model by moving from textbook rentals to digital student services, got slammed last week in the stock market. After reporting mixed results of better-than-expected earnings yet worse-than-expected revenues, their stock price lost 35% in one day (Feb 22). But this is not a story about Chegg or stock prices. What I find fascinating is an explanation that Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig provided about e-textbooks in his discussion with analysts.
Far too often people assume that digital equals low costs, even for textbooks. Then we get reports and surveys looking at digital textbooks as a method to “save money”, where it is almost assumed that digital textbooks do save money; it’s just a question of whether faculty take this fact into consideration. Or stock market analysts make the same assumption, which was the topic of Rosenweig’s discussion on Mad Money. In this conversation, as described at Seeking Alpha, Rosenweig made a very interesting observation.
Another misunderstanding is how e-textbooks affect Chegg’s revenue. Chegg has historically recognized 100% of the revenue from e-textbook sales. Interestingly, Rosensweig claims that e-textbooks used to be growing at 60% a year but have since slowed to 0%. In his Mad Money interview, Rosensweig explained that this decrease does not actually stem from volume, rather it is due to an unforeseen imbalance in the price of textbooks.
Students are choosing to rent textbooks in print rather than e-textbooks because the former are far cheaper. Rosensweig exemplifies this with Chegg’s most popular textbook, Campbell’s Biology. The price to rent this book in print is $20, compared to $107 for the e-book version. Who would purchase an e-book when he or she could rent the paper version for one-fifth the price?
That’s an interesting question, as it should give insight into whether schools are unusual in how long or short they’ve been using one solution. It should also give some insight into the market itself.
Blackboard’s VP of Teaching and Learning, Valerie Schreiner, was kind enough to give Phil and me a fairly thorough update on the Ultra strategy on Wednesday. Their strategy is clearer to me now. That strategy, which I am about to share with you, is fairly coherent, reasonably interesting, and practically plausible in principle. There are still big execution questions that won’t be answered until we see what is released at BbWorld and talk to some customers. (More on this later.) But at least we have a better sense of what they are trying to do now.
We don’t usually spend this much sustained time focusing on one company and product, but since we are getting a lot of feedback from readers that it is helpful and timely for them, and since Blackboard has been extremely responsive in providing us with clarifications, we’re going to stay on this one until we feel that it’s been adequately covered.
After Monday’s post on my confusion with Blackboard’s overall Learn strategy, I thought I would follow up with a reminder that there is one really important area where there are strong early signs that Blackboard is doing something right in a very important area: learning analytics. Learning analytics is one of those areas where there are many, many people talking and very few who are actually making sense. Blackboard has been hiring people that I usually call up when I have learning analytics questions and want to talk to somebody whose answers will actually make sense. To start with, they hired John Whitmer, who I have praised on this blog before. To get a flavor of who he is, here’s a talk that he gave when he was still back working at CSU:
If you’ve heard John give a talk post-hire (as you will have a chance to do a little later in this post), you’ll know that he is just as straight-talking, funny, and insightful now as then. And from our observations both at BbWorld 2015 and since, he appears to be in a position of significant influence within the company.
More recently, the company has hired Mike Sharkey to run their whole analytics group as part of their acquisition of his company, Blue Canary. Like John, he is one of those all too rare people who is both very good at explaining how learning analytics work and very comfortable calling BS on hype. It was a little tougher to find a recording of one of Mike’s talks for some reason, but here’s one of him when he was at the University of Phoenix:
Also recently, the company acquired X-Ray, a learning analytics product that was developed for Moodle and that Blackboard eventually intends to make available for Learn. Although the product itself is interesting, one of the motivations for the acquisition was that it included creator Sasha Dietrichson. I haven’t met Sasha yet but he has a reputation similar to that of John and Mike. I actually had the pleasure of attending Blackboard’s international launch event for X-Ray. I held off blogging about it because, in my opinion, the product still needed a little polish as of that event, but it’s worth bringing up in this context. You can see the whole event, including John’s presentation of the product, here:
(I recommend that you fast forward past the annoying animated commercial at the beginning.)
We haven’t yet seen these hires bear fruit in big ways (except arguably with X-Ray for the Moodle customers), but there are all the early indicators of a coherent investment in an analytics strategy that could turn into a major differentiator. So far, most of Instructure’s analytics work has been limited to making data available for others to use. And the last time we checked, D2L’s analytics strategy was stuck in the mud (although we are overdue for an update in that department and will be looking into it again soon). Furthermore, one major advantage of the new Learn SaaS architecture is that it provides infrastructure for learning analytics that would just not be possible on the older architecture. It’s hard for the company to tout that now when they don’t yet have products that show off the benefits. There is little question at this point that Blackboard grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take them to get the new architecture ready for prime time.
It’s possible that part of what we are seeing going on with Blackboard’s communications…er…strategy is that their product announcements (if, indeed, Ultra is a product) were so far out in front of delivery of any demonstrable benefits that it’s hard for anyone to explain the point of them without sounding completely pie-in-the-sky. Jay Bhatt felt a need, for whatever reason, to make grand pronouncements about how Blackboard was going to “transform education.” We criticized him for those comments at the time, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the damage he did through this penchant for grandiosity was more far-reaching than we imagined. But my larger point here is that, when I say that I am confused about what is going on in Blackboard, I really mean it. There may yet be a baby floating in this tub of stinky bathwater.
