Despite all the media hype on MOOCs over the past two years, perhaps the most important recent market entry for ed tech has been Canvas, the LMS from Instructure. Instructure was founded in 2008 by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley. At the time Brian and Devlin were graduate students at BYU who had just taken […]
Ed Tech
Open as in Transparent: Instructure Conducts 2nd Public Security Audit on Canvas LMS
I wrote a series of posts last fall about security testing for higher ed LMS products. In my initial post I called for more transparency. We need more transparency in the LMS market, and clients should have access to objective measurements of the security of a solution. To paraphrase Michael Feldstein’s suggestions from a 2009 post: There is […]
Mobile in Ed Tech: Moving Beyond Browser Replacement
In 2003 Steve Jobs made a speech to the International Design Conference in Aspen, and the audio for this speech has just been re-discovered and shared. There is even a transcription from the Verge available here. During his talk, Jobs foresaw future mobile devices as well as the challenge we would face in truly taking advantage […]
Lore Announcement Shows Promise of Cloud-Based Platforms: Low Cost of Design
You have to give credit where it’s due – Lore is a fast-moving ed tech startup that is not resting on its laurels. The New York based learning platform company has already rebranded (changing its name from Coursekit to Lore) and rewritten its core platform from the ground up. All in its first year. In […]
Piazza – An Example of Free Learning Tool Targeted at Faculty / Student Adoption
In my recent webcast with Patrick Masson for WCET, we described the growing usage of learning tools outside the official LMS solution. Patrick described survey results done by UMassOnline that captured the rich source of (often free) learning tools used in UMass courses. Much of educational technology is moving from an enterprise LMS market – […]
When Large Companies Enter Ed Tech
I had a very interesting conversation on the way home from EDUCAUSE with Frank Florence, who is the Senior Director of Education Market Management for Cisco. We discussed the changes happening in the ed tech market, and Frank helped me understand some of the market forces behind the changes we’re seeing. One topic in particular […]
Ambivalent on Ed Tech: The EDUCAUSE Re-write
Now that I’ve had time to digest the implications of EDUCAUSE 2011 – which were significant, but not as mind-blowing as the Reading Market experience – I keep going back to a post I wrote earlier this year (although not on e-Literate). In that post contrasting a Gartner report on IT spending with an Ambient Insight […]