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.

  • The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry

    For a few years starting in 2009, it seemed one of the best ways to raise VC funds or corporate internal investment was to say “we can beat Blackboard with a new cloud-based platform”. Witness Coursekit / Lore, Instructure / Canvas, OpenClass, LoudCloud Systems, Helix, and even more recently MOOC platforms. There were many articles written as these new systems entered the market, but what if we look back and ask whether the LMS market has actually changed recently? The picture that emerges is one of surprising resiliency by the established LMS providers.

    In fact, I would argue that in the past eight years (at least in North America) the only new system that has fully established itself in the LMS market is Canvas. Note that I have combined WebCT and ANGEL within the Blackboard umbrella, but even these systems established themselves more than a decade ago.

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  • Efficacy, Education, and the Last Mile

    I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about efficacy in education in light of the Pearson realignment. Is efficacy, a medical concept, a good lens through which to view our current educational technology challenges? Michael Feldstein laid out some reasons it might be in his treatment of the shift, but I’d like to expand on one of them — the “last mile”.

    One of the crucial elements of efficacy is that it is *not* solely a lab concept. Certainly you can talk about a drug’s efficacy in research trials, but in general what medical researchers are interested in is how the drug performs in real-world scenarios. And in real-world scenarios, regimen compliance (more recently referred to as “adherence”) is a huge issue. Here’s a good explanation of the problem:

     “We’ve got so many great medications out there, but how do you get the patient to take the drops correctly?” said Dr. Tsai. To answer [this] question, he turned to diabetes researchers, who have been at the forefront of the field. “The researchers don’t see the patients as being bad,” Dr. Tsai explained. “They just see barriers to adherence.” On their advice he created a taxonomy, or systematic classification, of all the barriers to adherence.

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  • Education M&A Activity in 2013: Still growing, but changing

    Like it or not, education is an industry, and much of the change we see affecting higher ed and K-12 institutions is driven by investment from the private sector. It can be useful to get a high-level view of the trends in private investments to help understand where private companies (edtech vendors, publishers, for-profit institutions, etc) are likely to move in the future.

    According to a new year-end report from Berkerey Noyes, a US-based investment banker, merger and acquisition activity in the education industry continued to grow in 2013, with the 9 of the 10 largest deals occurring outside of the US. As summarized at Education Week:

    A number of recent reports have shown or predicted a strong and growing demand for various educational products and services in markets such as Latin America, and the new, year-end report on transactions published by Berkery Noyes would seem to reinforce that portrait.

    “The big education players are acquiring to help manage the transition from print to digital,” Peter Yoon, managing director of Berkery Noyes’ education group, said in an interview. He said they’re also moving to “strengthen their presence in emerging markets.”

    The most active acquirer was Pearson PLC, with six deals that included the “acquisition of Grupo Multi Holding, an English language training company headquartered in Brazil, for $829 million”.

    In total there were 295 transactions for a total of $10.2 billion in value, which represented year-over-year growth of 8 and 27% respectively.

    Summary

    Beyond the international growth, there are two other items that jumped out at me – the shift towards strategic buyers and the strong growth in professional training.

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  • An Employee View of Textbook Publishers and Ed Tech Companies

    Update: For reference, 2U has pointed out to me that they were recently recognized by Glassdoor as the 17th-best medium-sized company to work for in 2014. With an average score of 4.2 (based on 21 reviews), this puts them on top of the other ed tech companies discussed here. The only other education company on the Glassdoor best places lists is Edmentum which, oddly, only has a 3.1 average rating based on 37 reviews.

    Second Update: All the education companies that have scored well on Glassdoor are coming out of the woodwork now. W.W. Norton has pointed out to me that the have a 4.2 average rating, based on 47 reviews. That puts them tied for first among education companies (that I know of) with 2U.

    One way to get a sense of how the companies whose products you depend on are doing is to talk to their employees. This is particularly helpful at times like this, when huge changes are underway. So I thought it would be interesting to take a survey of the employee reviews on Glassdoor of some of the major companies in the industry. The results are revealing, if not entirely surprising.

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  • Response from Babson Survey author on differences with IPEDS

    I have written a series of posts on the new IPEDS data, including two that showed how this data seems to be quite different from the pervasive Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) data (formerly known as the Sloan Survey). In particular, there were two findings, one on the number of students taking online courses:

    And no, there aren’t 7.1 million [from Babson] US higher ed students taking at least one online course. There are closer to 5.5 million [from IPEDS] as of Fall 2012.

    and one on the number of institutions offering online education:

    The big difference that should be obvious is that the Babson data shows less than half the number of institutions with no online offerings than the IPEDS data – 15% compared to 31%.

    Who has an online offering?

    I have been in contact with Jeff Seaman, one of the two authors of the BSRG reports, to get his analysis on the differences, including sharing my spreadsheets used for analysis of the two data sets. Jeff has graciously reviewed the data and provided the following analysis of why BSRG data is so different from IPEDS data.

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  • Update: Blackboard and Washington Post change the employee count

    Well that was a major change. As I noted yesterday, Blackboard described its reorganization efforts to the Washington Post for its Saturday profile of the company and CEO Jay Bhatt.

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 2,200 employees to date.

    This was interesting to me, since in Fall 2012 Blackboard gave information to both the Washington Business Journal and the Washington Post stating that the company had 3,000 employees. I noted this in my post yesterday:

    That is a significant change, if these stories are accurate, going from 3,000 employees to 2,200 in less than 18 months …

    The Washington Post just issued a correction to their story today that changes the numbers significantly:

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 3,000 employees to date.

    There is almost no explanation for the change in numbers, other than the following:

    An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Adrenna, the learning management platform. It also incorrectly stated how many people are employed at Blackboard. This version has been corrected.

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  • e-Literate TV Update and Request for Help

    We are fast approaching the release of our first e-Literate TV (ETV) series. Our latest estimate is that we will go live in mid-February with a collection of interview episodes filmed at EDUCAUSE 2013 covering the following topics:

    1. An overview of challenges in higher education that are driving conversations about educational technology
    2. A review of the online learning landscape
    3. A discussion MOOC mania
    4. An exploration of the genre of courseware
    5. A conversation about the basics of learning analytics and adaptive learning
    6. A review of one faculty member’s experience with classroom flipping

    Meanwhile, we are already hard at work on the second series, which will be called “Massive and Open: What Are We Learning?” Filmed primarily at the the MOOC Research Initiative Conference, the series takes a deeper dive into how people are actually using the tools that MOOCs offer in different contexts and discusses their promise as well as their problems. We expect this to be the model for future series, where we explore one topic from a number of angles rather than offering a smorgasbord like the pilot series. We have a long list of topics we’d like to cover in future series, ranging from increasing educational access to personalized learning to the promise and perils of big data in education and more.

    With the release of the first series around the corner, Phil and I would like to tell you more about our ideas for ETV and request your feedback and (verbal) support.

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