Yesterday morning Barnes & Noble Education, the owner of 743 college bookstores and related services, announced the acquisition of LMS provider LoudCloud Systems for $17.9 million in cash. LoudCloud provides a traditional LMS for general higher education and K-12 needs, and they are best known for their customer Grand Canyon University, a for-profit provider and partial […]
Courseware
Keynote: The Year After the Year of the MOOC
Here’s a talk I gave recently at the CIT event in Duke. In addition to being very nice and gracious, the Duke folks impressed me with how many faculty they have who are not only committed to improving their teaching practices but dedicating significant time to it as a core professional activity. Anyway, for what […]
New e-Literate TV Episode – CourseWare: What Comes After the Textbook
We’ve just published our fourth episode in the e-Literate TV pilot series. This one is about CourseWare. Frequent e-Literate readers will know that this is a topic Phil and I think is important and growing in importance. You’re most likely to have heard of the products from the big publishers—Pearson’s CourseConnect, McGraw Hill’s SmartBooks, Cengage’s […]
No, really, courseware is a thing now
In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially […]
MOOC as Courseware: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context
Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed: Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses. […]