In a series of announcements that has the educational technology world buzzing, Blackboard reversed their strategy of their core LMS business. Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers – MoodleRooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia. Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which includes helping “institutions successfully manage open source learning management […]
Educational technology
The Emerging Landscape of Educational Delivery Models
Part 2 in this series, on a key difference in educational delivery methods, can be found here. Traditional education or online education. In the past decade it seems that the dominant conversation has been around the potential for online learning, both from for-profit and non-profit options, to disrupt education as an industry. What I believe […]
Apple is Playing the Long Game with iBooks 2 and iTunesU App
When Apple made the iBooks Author / iBooks2 / iTunesU app announcement on January 19th, there were many arguments for and against their implied educational market strategy. In the educational technology community, two of the most intense arguments why Apple’s move was faulty, or even harmful, came down to the cost and availability of iPads […]
Social Learning Tools Are Fine, But Not Critical For All Educational Models
We are in a high point of investment and interest in the application of technology to innovate education, and a lot of attention has been paid to the new class of learning platforms that have social tools at the center of the platform design – think Instructure, Coursekit, OpenClass, etc. I have written about several […]
Great Title, Flawed Post – Khan Academy Enables Out-of-the-Box Approaches
There was a very interesting article at Huffington Post today that I suspect is rapidly making the rounds through the blogosphere. Given the author and title of the post, “What Silicon Valley Executives Keep Getting Wrong About Education” by Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, I had high hopes for an insightful explanation of mistakes by […]
Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform
Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and […]
The Tide is Turning – SOPA May Not Make It Out of Committee
Over the past few days, there have been three significant developments that indicate the tide is turning on SOPA (and the Senate version, PIPA). As I have written previously, SOPA poses a threat to open education and educational technology in general, while most educational publishers are actively supporting this legislation. At the end of 2011, […]