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.

  • Why Unizin is a Threat to edX

    In the week since we published our Unizin exposé, there has been nary a peep from the group to us, or apparently to the traditional news outlets either. When we ran the piece, we emailed Indiana University CIO Brad Wheeler to request comment or corrections. We have not heard back from him yet. Brad, if you’re reading this, our door is always open. Talk to us.

    Luckily for us, we don’t need to rely on new pronouncements from Brad to give us more insight into what’s going on. It turns out that he’s been speaking in public about this idea for years. He just hasn’t called it Unizin. And from what I can tell, it should give edX cause to worry.

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  • DOE Doubles Down on State Authorization: 25x increase in regulatory language

    Now that the Kabuki Theatre of the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking process has finished its penultimate act, can we all act surprised that the likely result includes the proposed State Authorization regulations growing by a factor of 25 with no comments allowed by one of the groups most affected?

    The gist of State Authorization is to force distance education and correspondence programs to comply not only with their home state regulations but to also comply with regulations for any state of residence for students. The proposed regulations from 2010 (struck down by courts in 2011) came in at 75 words:

    §600.9(c) If an institution is offering postsecondary education through distance or correspondence education to students in a State in which it is not physically located or in which it is otherwise subject to State jurisdiction as determined by the State, the institution must meet any State requirements for it to be legally offering postsecondary distance or correspondence education in that State. An institution must be able to document to the Secretary the State’s approval upon request.

    The most recent submission from DOE comes in at 1,912 words. You can read the full text here. This growth in regulatory language will have real costs. Today the president of Saint Leo College described how much of the administrative bloat in campuses is due to increasing federal regulations.

    Let me be clear, not all of the increases in college tuition and administrative bloat are caused by regulation, but some are—and far more than you think.

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  • Some Real Reasons the “Two-speed Internet” Hurts Higher Education (Hint: impact on the “Next Facebook” is not one of them)

    The debate around net neutrality so far has been almost as depressing as the set of judicial and administrative decisions that got us here. Central to the debate has been the obsession about how the two-speed internet will “stop the next Facebook/Google/Netflix” from being able to innovate.

    nextfacebook

    Save the Internet does a bit better than most at teasing out some of the other issues (privacy, freedom of speech), but states the business core of the argument like so:

    Net Neutrality lowers the barriers of entry for entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses by ensuring the Web is a fair and level playing field. It’s because of Net Neutrality that small businesses and entrepreneurs have been able to thrive on the Internet. They use the Internet to reach new customers and showcase their goods, applications and services.

    I’m not going to argue that this is wrong. Monopoly power on this scale is a dangerous thing. Until recently, there were decent laws preventing companies from owning all the media outlets in a single metro — we are now moving towards allowing one company to control most of America’s access to the Internet. It’s easy to put on the weary entitlement of “It’s all just Google vs. Comcast, Goliath vs. Goliath, what do I care?” But, of course, this is the well-established point of anti-monopoly law — the world is a better place for David when Goliath fights Goliath than when Goliath stands unopposed. When Goliath stands unopposed, bad things happen. You don’t have to root for Goliath Number Two to understand the utility of that.

    At the same time, these arguments have obscured some of the real threats to education that have nothing to do with the “next Facebook” scenario. Primary among these threats is the issue of what happens to traffic that is not from traditional content providers. I’d like to sketch out what that means for higher education, and why your institution should be talking about the dangers of creating a provider-paid express lane on the Internet.

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  • The IMS Is More Important Than You Think It Is

    I have long argued that the development of technical interoperability standards for education are absolutely critical for enabling innovation and personalized learning environments. Note that I usually avoid those sorts of buzzwords—“innovation” and “personalized learning”—so when I use them here, I really mean them. If there are two fundamental lessons we have learned in the last several decades of educational technology development, they are these:

    1. Building monolithic learning environments generally results in building impoverished learning environments. Innovation and personalization happen at the edges of the system.
    2. There are tensions between enabling innovation at the edges and creating a holistic view of student learning and a usable learning environment. Integration does matter.

    To these two education-specific principles, I would add a general principle about software:

    • All software eventually grows old and dies. If you can’t get your data out easily, then everything you have done in the software will die with it (and quite possibly kill you in the process).

    Together, these lessons make the case for strong interoperability standards. But arriving at those standards often feels like what Max Weber referred to as “the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It is painful, frustratingly slow, and often lacking a feeling of accomplishment. It’s easy to give up on the process.

    Having recently returned from the IMS Learning Impact Leadership Institute, I must say that the feeling was different this time. Some of this is undoubtedly because I no longer serve on any technical standards committees, so I am free to look at the big picture without getting caught up in the horrifying spectacle of the sausage making (to mix Germanic political metaphors). But it’s also because the IMS is just knocking the cover off the ball in terms of its current and near-term prospective impact. This is not your father’s standards body.

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  • Unizin: Indiana University’s Secret New “Learning Ecosystem” Coalition

    Indiana University has been the driving force behind the creation of a new organization to develop a “learning ecosystem”. At least ten schools are being quietly asked to contribute $1 million each over a three-year period to join the consortium. The details of what that $1 million buys are unclear at this point. The centerpiece for the short-term appears to be a contract with Instructure for use of the Canvas LMS. But there are also hints of ambitious plans regarding learning object repositories and learning analytics.

    What is remarkable is the level of secrecy surrounding the project. Several sources from involved schools have indicated that very few people have been informed regarding their institutions’ prospective involvement. When school discussions do take place, care is being taken to keep them quiet. For example, a video recording of a presentation to faculty about Unizin at Colorado State University has since been removed from public access after it received some attention on Twitter (although e-Literate downloaded a copy of the video before it was removed from public access).

    Nevertheless, details of the project are beginning to leak out. In this post, I will share the facts that we have been able to confirm. Phil and I will both follow on with some analysis and inferences early next week. And of course, we will continue to bring you updates as news breaks.

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  • Policy Updates on FERPA and Net Neutrality

    Two policy debates that could have a significant impact on education – updates on FERPA and data privacy & FCC proposals on Net Neutrality – both entered the next stage this week.

    FERPA Modernization

    I recently wrote about the new federal moves to update FERPA to handle the age of Big Data (should I have used scare quotes there?).

    Yesterday the White House released its report on big data and privacy implications. The focus was broadly on big data, but there will be implications for ed tech, with several key recommendations specifically focused on the education sector. Specifically, there will be a push to update and revise the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA, enacted in 1974) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, enacted in 2000).

    I was quite optimistic about the federal approach based on this report, and yesterday we got some more apparently good news – a bipartisan approach to improve data privacy and update FERPA made in a reasonable fashion (dogs and cats, living together). As reported by THE Journal, Senators Markey (D-MA) and Hatch (R-UT) introduced the “Protecting Student Privacy Act”, getting even a warm reception from the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), which had objected to the earlier version discussed in January. THE Journal summarized the key parts of the legislation (full text here): (more…)

  • Six Months After Layoffs: No signs of growth at Desire2Learn

    Late last year I wrote a post about Desire2Learn’s laying off more than 7% of the workforce, speculating that something had changed at the company. In particular, I didn’t buy the company line about continued growth.

    In the end, I have trouble believing that these recent cuts are solely based on improving Desire2Learn’s growth without needing to correct for slower-than-expected growth. The arguments made by our sources that these are significant cuts driven by not hitting growth targets are compelling. However, there is no smoking gun that I have found to back up these claims definitively.

    What I do feel confident in saying regarding employee numbers is that there’s more to the story here than just ‘churn’ alongside aggressive hiring. Since the end of the Blackboard patent lawsuit, Desire2Learn has grown at an average of 13 employees per month (140 in Nov 09, 560 in Sep 12, 750 in Nov 13). Yet the numbers might have actually gone down since July 2013.

    After that post, Desire2Learn (through an interview with a local media outlet) further explained the company line about growth with challenges. [emphasis added]

    The past year has included hirings and staff reductions as the developer of online learning software prepares for growth and expansion, says Dennis Kavelman, the Kitchener-based company’s chief operating officer.

    Kavelman stresses that the company is growing, not shrinking, and restructuring to handle the growth resulted in some layoffs.

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