Today Moodlerooms announced a partnership with Cambridge Global Grid for Learning that allows faculty and students to access content from Cambridge University Press, Reuters, Corbis, and other content providers from within Moodlerooms’ Joule platform. As far as I can tell, this partnership is roughly similar to ones that Blackboard has previously announced with McGraw Hill and NBC. I expect to see more of these going forward, so it seems worthwhile to take a little time and look at the details of how these deals work for everybody.
Let’s start with why these deals are happening. For the LMS providers, it’s a revenue stream. They get to charge content providers for access to the students and teachers. At a Deutsche Bank conference last September, Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen said,
With the publishers that we have relationships with, if they teach or download a specific publisher pack from a publisher that we have a relationship with to have that content run within our class environment, we make money from the number of students or faculty that then adopt that content within their course environment.
The publishers are essentially paying for storefront access. The think they will sell more content if they can expose teachers and students to it through the LMS.
What does this integration look like? Blackboard and McGraw Hill have a demo video here. (Sorry; it’s not embeddable.) The details are as follows:
- Students and teachers can search for and order publisher content through the LMS interface.
- There is single sign-on, so students can seamlessly move from the LMS to the publisher’s hosted content assets and back.
- There is integration with the LMS assignments and grade book tools.
Blackboard and McGraw Hill advertise that their integration is accomplished through the IMS Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standard. Since grade return and assignments integration is not supported in BLTI, Blackboard and McGraw Hill are presumably using extensions. These are allowed within the specification. Furthermore, the full LTI spec, which will probably be completed by some time in the second half of 2012, will support grade integration.
At any rate, while I think the rough shape of these deals is likely to be around for a while, the specific nature of the integration is likely to change. To begin with, I am skeptical that purchasing content through an LMS interface is likely to enhance the shopping experience. Furthermore, the coming of the tablet to higher education is likely to disrupt this relationship. While LMS vendors are building tablet interfaces, the truth is that educational content eReaders are likely to become their own software category with substantial affordances that are different than those of a tablet-enabled LMS. I expect that the content providers themselves, rather than the LMS vendors, are more likely to develop these interfaces. And once they are in place, they will be a much better point of sale. This is a problem, since a major portion of the value that content providers are paying for when they pay the LMS vendors is increased sales through the LMS interface. If that value proposition fails, then the deals the content providers are willing to strike will change significantly.
On the other hand, the ability to integrate provided content with assignments and grading tools, as well as the ability to support single sign-on, may be more enduring integration points. Some content vendors do provide their own LMS-like grading and assignment tools (I’m looking at you, Pearson myLabs). It’s not clear, however, whether or how quickly these are likely to displace the LMS tools that faculty are used to. Nothing is certain here. But if you just look at the transitional nature of these publisher/LMS vendor relationships and think through where the affordances are going, it really points to the fact that whole current educational technology ecosystem is at an inflection point right now. In a world where educational computing is largely PC-based and educational content is still mostly on dead trees, the LMS has dominant positioning. But in a world where educational computing is more tablet-based and educational content is mostly digital, the picture becomes more complicated.
Dear Mr. Feldstein,
Thanks so much for another great read. As usual, your insights are very interesting. I am the director of digital partnerships for McGraw-Hill Higher Education, and I have primary oversight over the McGraw-Hill/Blackboard relationship. I’d like to add some additional perspective on our relationship.
McGraw-Hill is a leader in educational content, and we’re quickly becoming the leader in educational technology and digital content. The primary focus of the McGraw-Hill/Blackboard partnership is all about improving the lives of faculty and students by simplifying their experience, increasing efficiency, and making them more productive by thoughtfully integrating our digital content and learning tools into the LMS. Our strong belief is that faculty and students should have single click access to all of their resources from their LMS, without the need to maintain multiple logons/systems. To that end, we used open standards (Basic LTI, as you mentioned) to integrate McGraw-Hill digital content and learning technologies into the Blackboard Learn 9.1 and 8.0 platforms.
In short, we believe we will collectively succeed by doing what’s best for our customers, which means making it easier than ever to use our content and platforms in concert and in the simplest way possible. McGraw-Hill’s Connect(R) platform is a purpose built platform for homework and assessment management (direct competitor to Pearson’s MyLab), and it is now fully integrated into Blackboard Learn 9.1 and 8.0. By integrating Connect(R) into Blackboard Learn 9.1 and 8.0, we offer an unprecedented integration of our two systems, which will lead to a dramatically improved faculty/student experience. That improved experience is the primary focus of our partnership. If we achieve that (which we believe we have), then we will collectively succeed.
Thanks again for a great post.
Doug Hughes
Director, Digital Partnerships
McGraw-Hill Higher Education