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.
Here’s a talk I gave recently at the CIT event in Duke. In addition to being very nice and gracious, the Duke folks impressed me with how many faculty they have who are not only committed to improving their teaching practices but dedicating significant time to it as a core professional activity.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s the talk:
I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in November 2013, and thanks to new data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data provides an anchor for the summary.
The primary data source for 2013 – 2014 is Edutechnica, which not only does a more direct measurement of a larger number of schools (viewing all schools in IPEDS database with more than 800 FTE enrollments), but it also allows scaling based on enrollment per institution. This means that the latter years now more accurately represent how many students use a particular LMS.
A few items to note:
Some observations of the new data taken from the post on Edutechnica from September:
- Blackboard’s BbLearn and ANGEL continue to lose market share in US -[1] Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), BbLearn has dropped from 848 to 817 institutions and ANGEL has dropped from 162 to 123. Using the revised methodology, Blackboard market share for > 800 enrollments now stands at 33.5% of institutions and 43.5% of total enrollments.
- Moodle, D2L, and Sakai have no changes in US – Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), D2L has added only 2 schools, Moodle none, and Sakai 2 schools.
- Canvas is the fasted growing LMS and has overtaken D2L – Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), Canvas grew ~40% in one year (from 166 to 232 institutions). For the first time, Canvas appears to have have larger US market share than D2L (13.7% to 12.2% of total enrollments using table above).
Ray Henderson captured the changing trend of the past two EDUCAUSE conferences quite well.
The #Edu14 drinking game: sure inebriation in 13 from vendor claims of "mooc" "cloud" or "disrupting edu". In 2014: "competency based."
— Ray Henderson (@readmeray) October 3, 2014
The #Edu14 drinking game: sure inebriation in 13 from vendor claims of “mooc” “cloud” or “disrupting edu”. In 2014: “competency based.”
Two years ago, the best-known competency-based education (CBE) initiatives were at Western Governors University (WGU), Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America (CfA), and SUNY’s Excelsior College. In an article this past summer describing the US Department of Education’s focus on CBE, Paul Fain noted [emphasis added]:
The U.S. Department of Education will give its blessing — and grant federal aid eligibility — to colleges’ experimentation with competency-based education and prior learning assessment.
On Tuesday the department announced a new round of its “experimental sites” initiative, which waives certain rules for federal aid programs so institutions can test new approaches without losing their aid eligibility. Many colleges may ramp up their experiments with competency-based programs — and sources said more than 350 institutions currently offer or are seeking to create such degree tracks.
One issue I’ve noticed, however, is that many schools are looking to duplicate the solution of CBE without understanding the the problems and context that allowed WGU, CfA and Excelsior to thrive. By looking at the three main CBE initiatives, it is important to note at least three lessons that are significant factors in their success to date, and these lessons are readily available but perhaps not well-understood.
The changes with Kuali are accelerating, and there are some big updates on the strategy.
Earlier this week the Kuali Foundation distributed an Information Update obtained by e-Literate on many of the details of the transition to Kuali 2.0 and the addition of the for-profit KualiCo. Some of the key clarifications:
- KualiCo will be an independent C Corporation with a board of directors. KualiCo will not be a subsidiary of Kuali Foundation. Capital structure, equity allocations, and business plans are confidential and will not be shared publicly for the same reasons these things are rarely shared by private companies. The board of directors will start out with three members and will move to five or seven over time. Directors will include the CEO and an equal number of educational administrators and outside directors. One of the educational administrators will be appointed by the Kuali Foundation. Outside directors will be compensated with equity. Educational administrators will not be compensated in any way and could only serve as a director with the explicit permission of their university administration with attention to all relevant institutional policies.
- KualiCo’s only initial equity investor is the Kuali Foundation. The Kuali Foundation will invest up to $2M from the Foundation’s cash reserves. [snip] For its equity investment, the Kuali Foundation will have the right to designate a director on the KualiCo Board of Directors. The Kuali Foundation, through its director, will have an exceptional veto right to block the sale of the company, an IPO of the company or a change to the open source license. This helps ensure that KualiCo will stay focused on marketplace-winning products and services rather than on flipping the company on Wall Street.
- The Kuali Foundation is not licensing the Kuali software code for Kuali products to KualiCo as Kuali software is already fully open source and could be used by anyone for any purpose — as is already being done today. No license transfer or grant is needed by KualiCo or anyone else.
- The copyright for the AGPL3 software will be copyright KualiCo for the open source distribution that is available to everyone. It would very quickly become untenable to even try to manage multiple copyright lines as various sections of code evolve through the natural enhancement processes of an open source community.
I have long thought that LinkedIn has the potential to be one of the most transformative companies in ed tech for one simple reason: They have far more cross-institutional longitudinal outcomes data than anybody else—including government agencies. Just about anybody else who wants access to career path information of graduates across universities would face major privacy and data gathering hurdles. But LinkedIn has somehow convinced hundreds of millions of users to voluntarily enter that information and make it available for public consumption. The company clearly knows this and has been working behind the scenes to make use of this advantage. I have been waiting to see what they will come up with.
I have to say that I’m disappointed with their decision that their first foray would be a college ranking system. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these sorts of things have zero utility, they suffer from two big and unavoidable problems. First, like any standardized test—and I mean this explicitly in the academic meaning of the term “test”—they are prone to abuse through oversimplification of their meaning and overemphasis on their significance. (It’s not obvious to me that they would be subject to manipulation by colleges the way other surveys are, given LinkedIn’s ranking method, so at least there’s that.) Second and more importantly, they are not very useful even when designed well and interpreted properly. Many students change their majors and career goals between when they choose their college and when they graduate. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 80% of undergraduates change their majors at least once, and the average student changes majors three times. Therefore, telling high schools students applying to college which school is ranked best for, say, a career in accounting has less potential impact on the students’ long-term success and happiness than one might think.
It would be more interesting and useful to have LinkedIn tackle cross-institutional questions that could help students make better decisions once they are in a particular college. What are the top majors for any given career? For example, if I want to be a bond trader on Wall Street, do I have to major in finance? (My guess is that the answer to this question is “no,” but I would love to see real data on it.) Or how about the other way around: What are the top careers for people in my major? My guess is that LinkedIn wanted to start off with something that (a) they had a lot of data on (which means something coarse-grained) and (b) was relatively simple to correlate. The questions I’m suggesting here would fit that bill while being more useful than a college ranking system (and less likely to generate institutional blow-back).
Well that was an interesting session at Educause as described at Inside Higher Ed:
It took the Kuali leadership 20 minutes to address the elephant in the conference center meeting room.
“Change is ugly, and change is difficult, and the only difference here is you’re going to see all the ugliness as we go through the change because we’re completely transparent,” said John F. (Barry) Walsh, a strategic adviser for the Kuali Foundation. “We’re not going to hide any difficulty that we run into. That’s the way we operate. It’s definitely a rich environment for people who want to chuck hand grenades. Hey, have a shot — we’re wide open.” [snip]
Walsh, who has been dubbed the “father of Kuali,” issued that proclamation after a back-and-forth with higher education consultant Phil Hill, who during an early morning session asked the Kuali leadership to clarify which parts of the company’s software would remain open source.
While the article describes the communication and pushback issues with Kuali’s creation of a for-profit entity quite well (go read the whole article), I think it’s worth digging into what Carl generously describes as a “back-and-forth”. What happened was that there was a slide describing the relicensing of Kuali code as AGPL, and the last bullet caught my attention: (more…)
This article is cross-posted to the WCET blog.
After billions of dollars spent on administrative computer systems and billions of dollars invested in ed tech companies, the U.S. higher education system is woefully out of date and unable to cope with major education trends such as online & hybrid education, flexible terms, and the expansion of continuing and extended education. Based on an investigation of the recently released distance education data for IPEDS, the primary national education database maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), we have found significant confusion over basic definitions of terms, manual gathering of data outside of the computer systems designed to collect data, and, due to confusion over which students to include in IPEDS data, the systematic non-reporting of large numbers of degree-seeking students.
In Fall 2012, the IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data collection for the first time included distance education – primarily for online courses and programs. This data is important for policy makers and institutional enrollment management as well as for the companies serving the higher education market.
We first noticed the discrepancies based on feedback from analysis that we have both included at the e-Literate and WCET blogs. One of the most troubling calls came from a state university representative that said that the school has never reported any students who took their credit bearing courses through their self-supported, continuing education program. Since they did not include the enrollments in reporting to the state, they did not report those enrollments to IPEDS. These were credits toward degrees and certificate programs offered by the university and therefore should have been included in IPEDS reporting based on the following instructions. (more…)
