On April 1, long-time eCollege (aka Pearson’s LearningStudio) customer Texas Christian University (TCU) gave an update on their LMS selection process to the student newspaper TCU360. In this article there was an interesting statement1 worth exploring [emphasis added]. “eCollege” will soon be a thing of the past. TCU has narrowed its search for a Learning […]
Ellucian Buys Helix LMS, But Will It Matter?
At this year’s Ellucian users’ conference #elive15, one of the two big stories has been that Ellucian acquired the Helix LMS, including taking on the development team. I have previously described the Helix LMS in “Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education” as well as the subsequent offer for sale in “Helix Education […]
GSV 2015 Review
The basic underlying theme of the 2015 GSV Ed Innovation conference is “more is more.” There were more people, more presentations, more deal-making, more celebrities…more of everything, really. If you previously thought that the conference and the deal-making behind it was awesome, you would probably find this year to be awesomer. If you thought it […]
Why LinkedIn Matters
A few folks have asked me to elaborate on why I think LinkedIn is the most interesting—and possibly the most consequential—company in ed tech. Imagine that you wanted to do a longitudinal study of how students from a particular college do in their careers, or the effect of social media for brick and mortar in […]
LinkedIn: I Told You So (Sorta)
In December 2012, I tweeted: https://twitter.com/mfeldstein67/status/276406235564220416 At the time, Coursera was the darling of online ed startups. Since then, it has lost its way somewhat, while Lynda.com has taken off like a rocket. Which is probably one big reason why LinkedIn chose to acquire Lynda.com (rather than Coursera) for $1.5 billion. I still think it’s […]
About the Diverging Textbook Prices and Student Expenditures
This is part 3 in this series. Part 1 described the most reliable data on A) how much US college textbook prices are rising and B) how much students actually pay for textbooks, showing that the College Board data is not reliable for either measure. Part 2 provided additional detail on the data source (College […]
Postscript on Student Textbook Expenditures: More details on data sources
There has been a fair amount of discussion around my post two days ago about what US postsecondary students actually pay for textbooks. The shortest answer is that US college students spend an average of $600 per year on textbooks despite rising retail prices. I would not use College Board as a source on this […]