e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: David-Wiley

  • 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 betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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  • What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?

    The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

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  • Textbook Publishers and OERs

    Not too long ago, The Chronicle ran an piece called “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources.” The meat of the article was some quotes of textbook company executives on a panel at an SIIA conference speaking out against a provision in a United States Department of Labor grants program that requires course materials being produced for grant-supported courses to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Here’s a taste of their comments:

    “I think it’s very dangerous for them to be in the product business,” said Bill Hughes, vice president of business development and innovation at Pearson Education.

    “There’s no free lunch,” said James Kourmadas, vice president of strategic marketing at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

    “I fear when big bucks from government is put into certain places, it actually stops pushing people to innovate,” said Kevin Wiggen, chief technology officer of Blackboard Xythos….

    “I think what the industry says is that we don’t see the point in the government collecting up taxpayer money and trying to rebuild an industry from scratch,” said Mr. Kourmadas of McGraw-Hill.

    To my esteemed fellow textbook industry professionals, I reply,

    Dudes. Seriously? (more…)

  • David Wiley on DIY U

    Since it was David Wiley’s unique blend of relentless idealism and can-do pragmatism that first convinced me to give the open education movement a closer look, I was curious to know what he thought of the discussion about DIY U that is happening on e-Literate. So I asked him. His blog post response does not disappoint. You should read it.

  • ITOE: History of Open Education

    Update: If I had watched the class lecture video before writing this, I would have known exactly what role open source played in early thinking about open educational resources. My bad.

    This is the first assignment post for the Introduction to Open Education (ITOE) class that I’m sitting in on. I’m tagging all assignment posts with “ITOE”. The assignment is as follows:

    Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement. Write a brief summary post on the history of the movement.

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  • The Quest for Openness

    I have signed up for David Wiley’s Introduction to Openness class. It’s free for online participants (although you don’t get college accreditation for it). In an intriguing move, he’s modeled the course somewhat after RPGs, where course “credit” (whatever that means in this model) depends on class- and guild-dependent quests. I will probably play a Merchant, although I’m tempted to be a Bard.

  • Open Forum Brain Dump

    I’m sitting in my hotel room near LAX early in the morning and I have a little time between the legs of my trip to reflect on the amazing experience I just had at The OPEN Forum. I must say, Thanos Partners did a superb job of organizing a fun, fascinating, and frictionless conference. (And the food. OMG.) I expect to write a number of posts reflecting on different facets that were covered during the forum, but this first one will mainly be a brain dump to capture a bunch of raw observations before they have a chance to fly out of my head.

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