e-Literate Top 20 Posts For 2014

I typically don’t write year-end reviews or top 10 (or 20) lists, but I need to work on our consulting company finances. At this point, any distraction seems more enjoyable than working in QuickBooks.

We’ve had a fun year at e-Literate, and one recent change is that we are now more willing break stories when appropriate. We typically comment on ed tech stories a few days after the release, providing analysis and commentary, but there are several cases where we felt a story needed to go public. In such cases (e.g. Unizin creation, Cal State Online demise, management changes at Instructure and Blackboard) we tend to break the news objectively, providing mostly descriptions and explanations, allowing others to provide commentary.

The following list is based on Jetpack stats on WordPress, which does not capture people who read posts through RSS feeds (we send out full articles through the feed). So the stats have a bias towards people who come to e-Literate for specific articles rather than our regular readers. We also tend to get longer-term readership of articles over many months, so this list also has a bias for articles posted a while ago.

With that in mind, here are the top 20 most read articles on e-Literate in terms of page views for the past 12 months along with publication date.

1. Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube? (Dec 2013) – This article proves that people are willing to read a 7,000 word post published on New Year’s Eve.
2. A response to USA Today article on Flipped Classroom research (Oct 2013) – This article is our most steady one, consistently getting around 100 views per day.
3. Unizin: Indiana University’s Secret New “Learning Ecosystem” Coalition (May 2014) – This is the article where we broke the story about Unizin, based largely on a presentation at Colorado State University.
4. Blackboard’s Big News that Nobody Noticed (Jul 2014) – This post commented on the Blackboard users’ conference and some significant changes that got buried in the keynote and much of the press coverage.
5. Early Review of Google Classroom (Jul 2014) – Meg Tufano got pilot access to the new system and allowed me to join the testing; this article mostly shares Meg’s findings.
6. Why Google Classroom won’t affect institutional LMS market … yet (Jun 2014) – Before we had pilot access to the system, this article described the likely market affects from Google’s new system.
7. Competency-Based Education: An (Updated) Primer for Today’s Online Market (Dec 2013) – Given the sudden rise in interest in CBE, this article updated a 2012 post explaining the concept.
8. The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry (Feb 2014) – Despite all the investment in ed tech and market entries, this article noted how stable the LMS market is.
9. Why VCs Usually Get Ed Tech Wrong (Mar 2014) – This post combined references to “selling Timex knockoffs in Times Square” with a challenge to the application of disruptive innovation.
10. New data available for higher education LMS market (Nov 2013) – This article called out the Edutechnica and ListEdTech sites with their use of straight data (not just sampling surveys) to clarify the LMS market.
11. InstructureCon: Canvas LMS has different competition now (Jun 2014) – This was based on the Instructure users’ conference and the very different attitude from past years.
12. Dammit, the LMS (Nov 2014) – This rant called out how the LMS market is largely following consumer demand from faculty and institutions.
13. Why Unizin is a Threat to edX (May 2014) – This follow-on commentary tried to look at what market effects would result from Unizin introduction.
14. State of the Anglosphere’s Higher Education LMS Market: 2013 Edition (Nov 2013) – This was last year’s update of the LMS squid graphic.
15. Google Classroom: Early videos of their closest attempt at an LMS (Jun 2014) – This article shared early YouTube videos showing people what the new system actually looked like.
16. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2014 Edition (Oct 2014) – This was this year’s update of the LMS squid graphic.
17. About Michael – How big is Michael’s fan club?
18. What is a Learning Platform? (May 2012) – The old post called out and helped explain the general move from monolithic systems to platforms.
19. What Faculty Should Know About Adaptive Learning (Dec 2013) – This was a reprint of invited article for American Federation of Teachers.
20. Instructure’s CTO Joel Dehlin Abruptly Resigns (Jul 2014) – Shortly after the Instructure users’ conference, Joel resigned from the company.

Well that was more fun that financial reporting!