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.

  • 2U registration for IPO offers insight into Online Service Provider market

    One of the biggest growth areas in education has been the Online Service Provider market. Alternatively known as Online Education Service Provider (OESP), School-as-a-Service, or Online Program Management (OPM), this market offers services to traditional colleges and universities that are creating online programs. In August I listed the LMS used by the top OSP providers, and while the data for this table is a year old, it does give a sense of who the major players are.

    SaaS LMS Chart 2

     

     

     

     

     

     

    How big are these companies? EmbanetCompass had estimated 2012 revenues of $130 million when Pearson acquired the company for $650 million. Deltak had estimated 2012 revenues of $54 million when Wiley acquired the company for $220 million. Academic Partnerships had estimated 2012 revenues of $43 million. I don’t have updated 2013 numbers, but various estimates have this market growing at 50% or more per year.

    Yesterday 2U, Inc submitted a S-1 document with the SEC, registering the company’s intention to go public in 2014. (more…)

  • e-Literate TV and Community-Negotiated Focus

    The goal of e-Literate TV (ETV) is to help school communities develop a working consensus around how they can use learning technologies to achieve important educational goals. For example, we’d like to be able to help schools that are motivated to improve student retention to identify appropriate ways that technology can help them do that. To do that, we have to do more than just provide relevant information. We have to provide it in a structure that encourages a productive culture of conversation and consensus building about these sorts of issues. It’s education as change management.

    In order to make ETV useful in that way, we’re developing (inventing? rediscovering?) a number of design principles. The first one, which I’ve written about before, is differentiated engagement. The ways in which deans, advising faculty, non-advising faculty, technology support staff, and other stakeholders need to be involved in a conversation about, for example, adopting a retention early warning system are different, as are the needs and interests of different individuals who have these roles. With the layered, hyper- and transmedia approach that we are able to take with our episodes, we can invite people to participate in the ways and to the degrees that are appropriate for them. We can help them find their zones of proximal curiosity, encouraging them to explore the issues a little further than they might have on their own while also recognizing that each individual is going to have limitations on how much they need or want to know.

    A second design principle we’re exploring is what we can call “community-negotiated focus.” Every school community is going to have its own collective zone of interest within a given topic. For example, Berkshire Community College may only be interested in MOOCs in cases where they are being used in an attempt to support remedial students or underserved populations, while Colorado State University Pueblo may be interested in how MOOCs are being used to flip classrooms and related labor issues. Once again, one size does not fit all. Phil’s recent post about our commitment to release the ETV videos under a Creative Commons license is intimately related to our goal of enabling ETV to be a resource that particular academic communities can customize to serve their particular needs.

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  • e-Literate TV Interviews from MRI13 Now Available

    In December 2013 Michael I attended the MOOC Research Initiative Conference (aka #MRI13 or “The greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs”). Thanks to a grant funded by the Gates Foundation through Athabasca University, we are creating three episodes of an upcoming e-Literate TV series based on the conference. We expect to release these episodes in March.

    MRI

    As part of developing material for the episodes, we interviewed a number of research grantees and ed tech luminaries. We had some great guests who spoke about what we have learned from MOOCs, what the potential applications are, what the downsides are, and where open education could and should go in the future. It was a unique opportunity to get so many well-informed people in one place on a common topic.

    Today we releasing these videos through the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. These videos all carry a Creative Commons license to facilitate sharing and repurposing of the material.

    (more…)

  • UF Online: What it is and what it isn’t

    Several weeks ago the University of Florida Online program opened for the Spring 2014 semester, accepting 600 transfer students, and the new program will accept Freshmen starting August 2014. This announcement comes just 2 years after the Florida legislature commissioned a study from the Parthenon Group on how to best leverage online programs in the state, and this program is probably one of the highest profile new online programs in the US within the past few years (along with California’s online initiative, Open SUNY, SJSU / Udacity and GaTech / Udacity).

    I had the opportunity to interview the executive director of UF Online, Dr. Betty Phillips, for additional background information. I’ll describe that interview along with my observations in a future post.

    In the e-Literate TV episode on online learning, Michael described the importance of focusing on the problem to be solved (at the 9:44 mark).

    The key, really, is to look at the problem you’re solving in the context of the particular college or university—what they have in terms of their strengths and resources, and what they’re missing—and then figure out what’s the best match between the problem and the solution.

    With that view in mind, let’s explore what UF Online is and what it isn’t.

    Background

    Two years ago the Florida state legislature funded the state university system’s Board of Governors to study online education in Florida, and by extension, to recommend how to expand online programs in a centralized fashion.  The Parthenon Group’s report was delivered in November 2012, and the state Strategic Planning Committee made the following recommendations in February 2013. (more…)

  • Online Education in US Public 2-year Institutions, focus on Michigan

    Last week I shared data tables for online education at US public 4-year institutions, with additional data for Florida. Now that I’m getting the process reasonably efficient for analyzing this data, there is some room for requests (hmm, slippery slope here).

    https://twitter.com/econproph/status/432308481786253313

    Since Jim teaches in Michigan, let’s review the 2-year data with additional data on his state.

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  • New look at LMS data for US small colleges

    Last fall I mentioned two new non-survey data sources available to track LMS adoption within higher ed. While surveys for subjective, attitudinal information still make sense, surveys of hard data are losing their value over time. Analyses of automatically collected system data place less of a burden on the organizations providing the information, and these analyses also allow a more agile approach to refining the data collection and viewing from different angles. Today Edutechnica released a new report on LMS adoption that demonstrates these benefits.

    When we provided our initial analysis of LMS usage in fall of 2013, one point of feedback that we heard loud and clear is that because our data only included institutions with greater than 2000 enrollments, we excluded a fair number of community colleges, career colleges, and liberal arts colleges. To the credit of those who provided this feedback, they were absolutely correct. Three-quarters of all recognized higher education institutions in the United States have fewer than 2500 FTE – a critical demographic as the majority of universities in the US are of this size or smaller. To more fairly represent LMS usage we needed to include data on smaller schools.

    We are now excited to be able to provide analysis of a data set for institutions with greater than 1000 students.

    The team presents the raw data for schools above 1,000 FTE, calling out some of the differences from their earlier report. But one key view they provided is looking at institutional LMS adoption per school enrollment size.

    Seeing Moodle’s increased usage prompted us to investigate Moodle further. An interesting thing happens below 2500 FTE; Moodle actually exceeds Blackboard’s market  share.  Only after this point do the demographic segments diverge. (more…)

  • Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education

    At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.

    Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”

    “Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

    His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.

    “The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

    I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.

    https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064

    (more…)