e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: EDUCAUSE

  • Notes on EDUCAUSE 2018

    Notes on EDUCAUSE 2018

    I recently finished three weeks of travel to ed tech conferences – Online Learning in Toronto, WCET in Portland, and EDUCAUSE in Denver. Given the size of EDUCAUSE and its history of being the place to see the greatest number of vendors in one location, that conference is a good trigger to cover general ed tech market news.

    Official photo of EDUCAUSE exhibit hall from promotional tweet
    Source: https://twitter.com/educause/status/1034810456584740864

    EDUCAUSE By the Numbers

    John O’Brien, president and CEO of EDUCAUSE, described in his welcoming speech and in an interview how this was the largest conference yet for the organization, with more than 8,000 registered attendees including more than 3,000 first-timers. I asked O’Brien about the changing and more crowded environment for ed tech conferences – with WCET, ASU/GSV, Online Learning, various vendor conferences, SXSWedu, and others – and he indicated that more is better. In other words, EDUCAUSE does not see a need to change due to competition, as there is room for multiple conferences with different emphases.

    The direction that EDUCAUSE is going can be seen in O’Brien’s recent article “Strategic IT: What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There”. In this view, technology is integrated, so the organization and conference must bring in decision-making from outside the IT organization.

    To fully realize the value of information technology as the strategic asset it is, we must embrace strategic IT. What got us here, a remarkable utility mindset, will no longer suffice. Instead, higher education leaders must consider the role and placement of information technology in the strategic fabric of their institutions.

    Based on interviews with O’Brien as well as multiple sponsoring vendors on the exhibit hall, these are the key numbers:

    • Total attendance of 8,018
    • Of these almost 5,900 opted to share registration info, implying that 2,100 opted out of sharing info (and I assume that the vast majority of the 2,100 are from higher ed schools)
    • Just over 3,000 were first-time attendees
    • Almost 2,700 were from vendors, both as sponsors / exhibitors and paying attendees to walk around; another 200 or so were from foundations, media, associations, and other organizations
    • Therefore 5,000 – 5,100 attendees were from institutions of higher ed, with more than 300 of those attendees from outside the US

    In 2017:

    • Total attendance of 8,000
    • More than 1,600 first-time attendees
    • More than 6,900 opted to share registration info

    There is somewhat of a disconnect, however, in that the exhibit hall certainly didn’t feel crowded or busy, at least compared to previous years. Most vendors I talked to described traffic at booths somewhat healthy but not at a peak for this conference. I also do not know why the registration list from last year had more 1,000 more than this year. I have asked EDUCAUSE for commentary or clarification on the attendance numbers; while their PR firm did respond to my email, I have not received any updates on the numbers other than saying “it cannot be assumed that the opt-outs were from higher education schools”.

    One other disconnect was noted by Josh Kim at Inside Higher Ed in his post about the EDUCAUSE Top Ten IT Issues list released at the conference.

    Curious About the Lack of Overlap with the ELI 2019 Key Issues in Teaching and Learning List:

    Perhaps the existence of the ELI Key Issues list exempts the EDUCAUSE mothership from putting teaching and learning related issues on its list. I still read the lack of teaching and learning issues as curious. How could it be that academic transformation is everywhere in the ELI community, and nowhere to be found in the IT list? Maybe the EDUCAUSE list should have one entry that says “see the ELI list.”

    I see the same issue where the EDUCAUSE “mothership” in many ways does not directly speak to teaching and learning issues, which is confusing given the direction the organization is taking. When I asked John O’Brien about this situation, he indicated that they have been increasing their emphasis on T&L issues at the leadership level. The answer is not that EDUCAUSE wants to point all T&L issues to ELI, but the integration is a work in progress, I suppose.

    Big Tech Companies

    Moving beyond the numbers, what struck me the most was the increasing presence of Big Tech at the conference. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM were all there in force, with an increased focus on education as a vertical market. Only Apple was missing.

    The question, especially for Google, is how much they plan to fully jump into higher education as opposed to dabbling in the market with a ‘let’s see how this tech gets used’ approach of the past. I get conflicting messages in this regard, at least for Google. For example, I asked a sales lead in the booth about Google Classroom and whether they plan to push this into the higher ed LMS market. He answer was clear that Classroom belongs in the K-12 market, but in higher ed they have no need to try and displace Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, et al. For higher ed, they plan to use Course Kit, their set of tools integration G Suite with the campus LMS, to incrementally get more exposure. When I talked to one well-known university CIO, however, he said that Google is responding to his push to fully jump in and even expand Classroom usage as an LMS alternative. Don’t treat this as a full description of the issues but rather one example of mixed messages.

    Microsoft and Amazon, however, are really expanding their higher ed solutions and market presence.

    In years past, EDUCAUSE exhibit hall was dominated by the ERP companies plus Blackboard and the publishers. In the ERP space, Oracle, Workday, Ellucian, and Jenzabar had large booths and aggressive marketing presence. Yes, I mention Jenzabar in that group, at least in terms of conference booth and marketing presence. Expect more on that story in the coming months.

    Moodle Presence

    For the first time, Moodle HQ had their own booth at the conference rather than solely relying on Moodle Partners for messaging. In fact there was a mini-Moodle alley at the left side of the hall, with eThink, Moodle HQ, and Moonami all together. This marketing move is significant after last year’s funding round of $6 million for Moodle HQ and this year’s news of Blackboard / Moodlerooms leaving the Moodle Partner program. I don’t know how far this new marketing spend will go in influencing LMS decision-making at colleges and universities, but it is significant that the world’s largest LMS is now spending money to raise awareness of what Moodle currently offers and what it can be.

    Additional Notes

    • If you ever wondered how many 20-somethings you could possibly fit in one large conference booth, I hope you visited Splunk to see the answer.
    • Cybersecurity – both in terms of protection / audit services as well as content for training and certificates – was another area with increased emphasis this year.
    • In a strange way, video is becoming a crowded market (again). Lecture capture, streaming, synchronous collaboration tools, etc. Where did this new market investment come from?
    • At the booth with the punching bag game, I should have invited 35-year-old Phil to be competitive with the eThink and Moodle guys. At least, I’ll pretend that this was the issue.

    Update 11/21: Clarified response status from EDUCAUSE at their request.

  • e-Literate Sightings in the Fall 2018 Conference Season

    e-Literate Sightings in the Fall 2018 Conference Season

    We should have posted this a week ago, but we at e-Literate are in the midst of Fall 2018 conference season, and we’d love to connect with people at the various conferences we’re attending. We’re going for the divide-and-conquer strategy this year.

    We’re looking forward to connecting in person and scouring for tasteful tchotchkes we can put in new conference bags.

  • We’re Giving a Course on Personalized Learning Next Month

    Working with our good friends at ELI, we’re going to be offering a three-session synchronous course called Personalized Learning: Finding the Model That Fits Your Institution July 6th through 20th. As you know, we’re still in early days for personalized learning. Most campus communities are still trying to figure out what it is and what it’s good for—if they’re aware of it at all as a group. Plus, one size most emphatically does not fit all. The goal of the course is to help participants sharpen their own ideas for appropriate ways to facilitate exploration of the topic at their own institutions.

    The format will be highly participatory, especially in the second and third sessions. Phil and I expect that we will all learn a lot from each other.

    Join us!

  • Instructure Dodges A Data Bullet

    Last week’s EDUCAUSE conference was relatively news free, which is actually a good thing as overall ed tech hype levels have come down. Near the end of the conference, however, I heard from three different sources about a growing backlash against Instructure for their developing plans for Canvas Data and real-time events. “They’re Blackboarding us”, “the honeymoon is over”, “we’re upset and that is on the record”. By all appearances, this frustration mostly by R1 institutions was likely to become the biggest PR challenge for Instructure since their 2012 outage, especially considering their impending IPO.

    The first complaint centered on Instructure plans to charge for daily data exports as part of Canvas Data, which Instructure announced at InstructureCon in June as:

    a hosted data solution providing fully optimized data to K-12 and higher education institutions capturing online teaching and learning activity. As a fundamental tool for education improvement, the basic version of the service will be made available to Canvas clients at no additional cost, with premium versions available for purchase.

    What that last phrase meant was that monthly data access was free, but institutions had to pay for daily access. By the EDUCAUSE conference, institutions that are part of the self-organized  “Canvas R1 Peers” group were quite upset that Instructure was essentially selling their own data back to them, and arguments of additional infrastructure costs were falling flat. (more…)

  • EDUCAUSE and Robot Tutors In The Sky: When investors are your main customers

    Yippie i ohhh ohh ohh
    Yippie i aye ye ye
    Robot tutors in the sky

    Before I head out to Indianapolis for the EDUCAUSE conference, I keep thinking back to a comment someone made in response to Michael’s description of Knewton marketing as “selling snake oil”. I can’t find the exact quote, but the gist was:

    This is what happens when you start to see VCs as your main customers.

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  • The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One’s Own

    I have been meaning for some time to get around to blogging about the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) paper on a Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) and Tony Bates’ thoughtful response to it. The core concepts behind the NGDLE are that a next-generation digital learning environment should have the following characteristics:

    • Interoperability and Integration
    • Personalization
    • Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
    • Collaboration
    • Accessibility and Universal Design

    The paper also suggests that the system should be modular. They draw heavily on an analogy to LEGOs and make a call for more robust standards. In response, Bates raises three concerns:

    1. He is suspicious of a potentially heavy and bureaucratic standards-making process that is vulnerable to undue corporate influence.
    2. He worries that LEGO is a poor metaphor that suggests an industrialized model.
    3. He is concerned that, taken together, the ELI requirements for an NGDLE will push us further in the direction of computer-driven rather than human-driven classes.

    As it happens, ELI’s vision for NGDLE bears a significant resemblance to a vision that some colleagues and I came up with ten years ago when we were trying to help the SUNY system find an LMS that would fit the needs of all 64 campuses, ((I understand that SUNY has since added a 65th campus)) ranging from small, rural community colleges to R1 universities to medical and ophthalmology schools to a school of fashion. We got pretty deep into thinking about the implementation details, so it’s been on my mind to write my own personal perspective on the answers to Tony’s questions, based in large part on that previous experience. In the meantime, Jim Groom, who has made a transition from working at a university to working full-time at Reclaim Hosting, has written a series of really provocative and, to me, exciting posts on the future of the digital learning environment from his own perspective. Jim shares the starting assumption of the ELI and SUNY that a learning environment should be “learner-centric,” but he has a much more fully developed (and more radical) idea of what that really means, based on his previous work with A Domain of One’s Own. He also, in contrast to the ELI and SUNY teams, does not start from the assumption that “next-generation” means evolving the LMS. Rather, the questions he seems to be asking are “What is minimum amount of technical infrastructure required to create a rich digital learning environment?” and “Of that minimal amount of infrastructure we need, what is the minimal amount that needs to be owned by the institution rather than the learner?” I see these trains of thought emerging his posts on a university API, a personal API, and a syndication bus. What’s exciting to me about these posts is that, even though Jim is starting from a very different set of assumptions, he is also converging on something like the vision we had for SUNY.

    In this post, I’m going to try to respond to both Tony and Jim. One of the challenges of this sort of conversation is that the relationship between the technical architecture and the possibilities it creates for the learners is complex. It’s easy to oversimplify or even conflate the two if we’re not very careful. So one of the things that I’m going to try to do here is untangle the technical talk from the functional talk.

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  • Wanted – A Theory of Change

    Phil and I went to the ELI conference this week. It was my first time attending, which is odd given that it is one of the best conferences that I’ve attended in quite a while. How did I not know this?

    We went, in part, to do a session on our upcoming e-Literate TV series, which was filmed for use in the series. (Very meta.) Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz did a fantastic job of both facilitating and participating in the conversation. I can’t wait to see what we have on film. Phil and I also found that an usually high percentage of sessions were ones that we actually wanted to go to and, once there, didn’t feel the urge to leave. But the most important aspect of any conference is who shows up, and ELI did not disappoint there either. The crowd was diverse, but with a high percentage of super-interesting people. On the one hand, I felt like this was the first time that there were significant numbers of people talking about learning analytics who actually made sense. John Whitmer from Blackboard (but formerly from CSU), Mike Sharkey from Blue Canary (but formerly from University of Phoenix), Rob Robinson from Civitas (but formerly from the University of Texas), Eric Frank of Acrobatiq (formerly of Flat World Knowledge)—these people (among others) were all speaking a common language, and it turns out that language was English. I feel like that conversation is finally beginning to come down to earth. At the same time, I got to meet Gardner Campbell for the first time and ran into Jim Groom. One of the reasons that I admire both of these guys is that they challenge me. They unsettle me. They get under my skin, in a good way (although it doesn’t always feel that way in the moment).

    And so it is that I find myself reflecting disproportionately on the brief conversations that I had with both of them, and about the nature of change in education.

    (more…)