This is part 3 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6. If you want to understand how a company is going to treat you as a customer, you have to […]
edunomics
More Corroborating Info on Cost of Sales
Mark Carden makes an interesting observation that supports Jim Farmer’s calculations regarding Blackboard’s cost of sales: I know something about the cost of sales issue, having sold library automation software for most of the past ten years (at Innovative and Dynix). I have long said that it costs the major ILS/LMS vendors an average of […]
More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"
Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most […]
Blackboard by the Numbers
Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive […]
The Chronicle: 8/13/2004: Professors Seek Compensation for Online Courses
According to this article in the Chronicle, it looks like an increasing number of institutions are putting the screws to their faculty to do more online learning work for less money. The story starts with an anecdote about a county college in California pressuring faculty to use sabbatical time for online course development. It continues […]
eCornell Research Blog: UMassOnline Revenue Grows 47%
Via eCornell, here’s a story in TMCnet about massive growth in UMass’ online learning program. What I’m interested in, though, is whether this growth leads to profit. It’s great to bring money into the institution, but it would be even better if some of that money stayed in the institution after paying for the program’s […]
Sloan-C – Resources
This article [PDF], though two years old now, has some still eye-opening figures on distance learning adoption in higher ed. Among the more interesting findings: Nearly one third of all higher ed institutions and one half of all public higher ed institutions now offer complete degree programs online. On average, in institutions that had distance […]