e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edtech

  • The Billion Dollar EdTech Platform Hole

    Actually, make those plural: billions, holes…

    In my last post I began to frame a multi-part discussion about the state of play of #edtech and how response to the global pandemic will result in a significant acceleration of what has been a relatively long and drawn out adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning. And, while it seems an obvious statement – in light of the extraordinary increase in, say, use of technology-enabled grocery delivery – my point is that many of the specific objections and barriers that persisted are moot in the face of the alternative (insolvency of the institution). As those issues are reconciled, it is clear that a key driver is the (re?)realization that organizing around the needs of learners is job one.

    Let’s start with a quick historical take on the various players in the education ecosystem and their assertions about how technology, platforms and data would transform the education landscape. I will speak in broad brush generalities and to protect the innocent and guilty I will not use names of companies, institutions or individuals.

    Some quick, level-setting definitions for purposes of this post (obviously leaving some categories out at this point of the series):

    Publishers – large and small purveyors of products including textbooks and online courseware systems that are based on a specific author’s (or team of authors’) content, pedagogy and reputation.

    Institutions – including higher education state systems, for-profits and consortia

    LMS providers – commercial and not-for-profit providers of learning management systems (LMS) / virtual learning environments (VLEs) and course management systems (CMS)

    Point Solution providers – defined as offerings typically designed to solve on specific business problem. Due to this specialization and focus, point solutions are champions in their specific area of functionality.

    Going back more than twenty years, we saw the first portals and LMS companies enter the market. Most of the positioning related to efficiencies like “get out of line and get on line” – for example, providing online access to registrar and bursar functions, anytime access to course materials like syllabi and handouts, and even rudimentary online office hours. For the institutions, the LMS promised to give students an anytime, anywhere access point to their courses and ideally for the institution to have another vehicle for collecting data. But it was hard work!  The teaching faculty were mostly left to their own devices to set these courses up; it took well more than a decade for 50% of US college courses to have an instance in their local LMS that presented much more than a file download of their syllabus.

    Publishers, on the other hand, used technology to create marketing splash and develop bundles intended to preserve the demand and value of the underlying print product. What started as CD-ROMS in the back of books became online access to supplemental course content and eventually to auto-graded online homework systems (a huge time-savings benefit to teaching faculty, especially in quantitative disciplines). As I mentioned in my last post, these systems typically comprise a fraction of the overall course experience. It is also evident that not all disciplines could be supported effectively by the auto-graded homework systems.

    Point solutions providers invariably entered the market chasing whatever cycle of buzzword-worthy solution development was in vogue: e-portfolios, lecture capture, e-books (42 at the peak, including “fit for learning” tablets), and adaptive learning platforms to name a few. As my definition indicates, these typically solved for a specific value proposition and many championed big ideas for the market broadly. Many failed along the way, a smaller number operate independently today as small companies, while a surprising number were acquired and bundled into the LMS and Publisher portfolios.

    Meanwhile, Institutions have been developing their own technologies as well. Partnering with other institutions to build LMS as well as creating point solutions like clickers, e-book readers and adaptive systems.

    And along the way, each of these organizations staked their claims to the nature of the market:

    • “the cable television network of education”
    • “the EBay of education”
    • “the consortium that will flip the textbook market on its head”
    • “the Amazon of education”

    You get the idea.

    It’s in that incomplete, but sufficient context, that I want to make my case. It takes millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, to build, maintain and evolve education technology platforms. Across the landscape there are dozens and dozens of organizations that have made investments at that order of magnitude. In some instances, organizations built and acquired more than one. That adds up to billions of dollars.

    And yet, the learner journey and experience remains very disjointed in today’s reality. In the spirit of academic freedom, an overwhelming majority of individual teaching faculty curate the materials and tools for their courses. And since it is the very rare case for a single provider to deliver an end-to-end experience – it is rather common for students to be required to navigate multiple, disparate systems, jump through multiple authentication sequences, and experience jarring differences in user experience and content fidelity. Beyond the challenges of the interactive experience, this form of curation can also complicate topics like affordability and equity of access for diverse student audiences.

    In the background, industry technology interoperability standards have evolved tremendously but are implemented in asymmetrical, unpredictable and sometimes proprietary ways. The use of instructional designers by institutions is growing, but there are still only 10,000 or so individual practitioners or roughly 1 per 100 teaching faculty members. These and other efforts can help, but are really band-aids covering bigger issues.

    Billions of dollars spent to develop products that are still hard to use because of massive market inefficiencies, competitive dynamics and other challenges in the broader education ecosystem.

    And here we are, the great acceleration. Yes, adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning is and will accelerate further. But the question is how higher education institutions and the companies that serve them will react to preserve (or not) academic freedom. Certainly, there is a bi-furcation within the market and even within institutions for more top-down course design and development – but a significant percentage of the overall enrolments are based in institutions with far more complex academic freedom cultures and governance models.

    I think this bi-furcation will widen. More and more courses will be built to “scale” with super clean instructional design, careful consideration of student engagement models, insightful use of data to drive outcomes, and “hands on” training for instructors who will deliver using best practices, their own skills and experiences, but little academic freedom.

    On the other hand, institutions for which academic freedom is a key tenet in their institutional mission will strive to build the capacities necessary to preserve their brands and the uniqueness of their teaching culture, while delivering high quality, differentiated learner experiences in technology-enabled environments. For these institutions, two things will become paramount: 1) changes to tenure and promotion incentives and 2) providing the time and resources (including outsourced services) to help faculty develop great courses.

    And those are not the only big changes looming: those institutions will become far more demanding of the companies seeking to provide them with content, technologies and services to ensure those offerings are not locked into proprietary platforms and business models. As they don’t say in politics, it’s about the learner experience, stupid!

    Next Up: The Netflix of Education, part ad nauseum

  • Winter Is Here: EdTech investments and M&A dropped significantly in 2016

    Winter Is Here: EdTech investments and M&A dropped significantly in 2016

    With the long-term rise in Ed Tech investments – starting in roughly 2007 – many analysts have been predicting a fall for several years. Maybe not a bubble burst like we saw in 2001, but a real drop in activity and volume. Now we also find out that there is also a 70% drop in mergers and acquisition values for the education industry according to a new analysis by the investment bankers Berkery Noyes.

    Throughout 2016 we had plenty of signs that the change was finally here. I got into the act in response to a ludicrous TechCrunch article that concluded that Ed Tech was “2017’s big, untapped and safe investor opportunity”. By the end of the year, there were several reports that investment (venture capital, private equity) had definitely gone down in 2016. Audrey Watters reported “The total dollars invested in 2016 are off by about $2 billion from this time last year”. EdSurge reported a drop of 31%. CB Insights reported a drop of 32% (based on estimates for Q4). (more…)

  • OSU Panel Discussion: Faculty experience with adaptive learning for Intro to Psychology course

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article and highlighted comments on vendors over-promising here at e-Literate. This time I’d like to highlight part of a panel discussion where a faculty member relates her experiences – what worked and what didn’t work – when using adaptive learning tools.

    Kathryn Becker-Blease has taught Intro to Psychology, a large lower-division lecture course, using both traditional quizzing and with adaptive quizzing with the help of Macmillan’s LearningCurve. In this part of the panel discussion Susana Rivera-Mills, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, asks Becker-Blease about her experiences based on research and teaching.

    (more…)

  • Marketing Claims From Adaptive Learning Vendors As Barrier To Adoption

    In Spring 2016, faculty, support staff and administrators at Oregon State University met to candidly share their experiences with adaptive learning technology. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.))  I shared two different videos from the event at EdSurge in this article.

    At one point I asked what people saw as risks or barriers to further adoption of adaptive learning courseware, and two people had very similar responses. In a nutshell, the over-active marketing claims from many vendors could be the biggest barrier. This is somewhat counter-intuitive as over-active marketing is commonly seen as the cause of technology being adopted even when it should not be. Listen to their responses (< 30 seconds).

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  • Changes at D2L: A second-hand view from users conference

    As I have described to several executives at D2L, there is an interesting gap between the progress we have seen with the company’s product improvements and the reaction we hear from many of their customers. With the tighter integration with LeaP and the improved usability, particularly in content authoring, I would have expected to hear more customers react to the changes. But when talking directly to many of the institutions using the Brightspace LMS, staff describe D2L as if the company and product line had not changed in several years. What is not clear is whether this gap is due the company missing the mark (and my judgement of improvements not aligning with what colleges and universities want) or whether there is just a lag where it will take time for most customers to believe in and take advantage the new product designs and features.

    2016 has been an eventful year for D2L. COO Cheryl Ainoa, a longtime veteran of Yahoo! and most recently Intuit, joined the company in April. Although this move was not advertised through press releases or even blog posts, I believe this is a significant change to how the company operates. This is not the first time that D2L has reached outside the industry for a top executive, as they employed Dennis Kavelman from RIM / Blackberry as COO from 2012 – 2014 (the period where D2L raised $165 million in two mammoth funding rounds). But I have heard that the addition of Ainoa has already seen results internally. And in the ‘keeping work in perspective’ category, founder and CEO John Baker and his wife had their first child right before the Fusion Users Conference. (more…)

  • TechCrunch: “EdTech – 2017’s big, untapped and safe investor opportunity”

    David Bainbridge, CEO of UK-based Knowledgemotion, wrote a post on Saturday in TechCrunch titled “Edtech is the next fintech” calling out the huge, untapped potential of EdTech. Thanks to Alan Levine for sharing this one. Spoiler alert:

    But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunities edtech promises the world’s largest content providers, the biggest educational institutions and any investor looking for a “sure thing” are almost endless. While it might be slightly late to the “digital-first” party, edtech is poised to be the biggest and possibly most profitable digitalized sector yet.

    This is exciting! Not only could EdTech be the biggest market sector yet, it is also “also the safest bet for investors”. Oh my goodness, tell me more. (more…)

  • Why Is Blackboard Laying Off Staff Despite Improved Market Share Position?

    Over the past two weeks Blackboard had another round of layoffs, likely due to the company missing financial targets. While one estimate places the number at roughly 200, from what I have heard the number is closer to 90 – 100 people let go. I asked the company for commentary on the layoffs and associated reorganization. By email they declined to comment on the number of employees let go but added this comment:

    These changes included the elimination of select positions across the company. We deeply appreciate the contributions made by the affected employees and are supporting them in their transition.

    This is not the first layoff at Blackboard since they were taken private in 2011; rather this is the latest in a series of cuts that have gone well beyond “trimming the fat”. Posts on thelayoff.com and glassdoor paint a picture of high attrition due to routine layoffs and many staff leaving by their own choice. We have written on several of these events here at e-Literate. 90 here, 100 there, 74 . . . it adds up, especially when combined with staff departures.

    To get another view into the company downsizing, consider that Blackboard recently signed a lease that will trim its corporate headquarters by 37%:

    Founded in a Dupont Circle row house in 1997, Blackboard, which has occupied 111,895 square feet at 650 Massachusetts Ave. since 2008, will move into Ogilvy Public Relations Wordwide’s former space on the eighth through 10th floors [70,482 square feet] beginning in December 2015.

    This follows a recent move in its Reston, Virginia facility that cuts its office space there by over 50%.

    In an ironic turn of events, the new headquarters move will put the company into the same building it occupied before 2008, and their neighbors in the building will include former CEO Michael Chasen’s SocialRadar and CBE provider FlatWorld.

    Why More Layoffs When US Market Share Finally Stabilizes?

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