e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edunomics

  • Online Learning: Where is the Money?

    MIT offers their MITx online courses and certificates for a price, Stanford offers some online courses free, and Utah State University professor Wiley provides successful students with letters confirming course completion. But offering online learning has failed many using these business models. Cambridge, Chicago, Cornell, Michigan, New York and Oxford, Stanford, Temple and Yale Universities, University of Maryland University College and the London School of Economics all terminated their online courses for financial reasons. They were all started assuming student tuition and fees would pay for both the cost of operation and for developing very effective, high quality course materials.

    As Case Western Vice President for Information Services Lev Gonick summarized: ”University presidents got dollars in their eyes and figured the way the university was going to ride the dot-com wave was through distance learning.”

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  • Why Ed Tech Innovation Is Speeding Up

    I have a lot to write about, coming off of BbWorld and Desire2Learn FUSION. But before I get into all of that, I just have to publish this brief “Amen” post to Phil’s last one. It’s hard to overestimate the impact that lower cost of development is going to have on educational technology in the years ahead. Instagram had only 13 employees—only eight of which were actually software developers—when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. The new owners of Digg have announced that they expect to rebuild the entire platform from the ground up in six months. It is literally an order of magnitude cheaper to build a platform today than it was ten years ago, when concrete foundations of the current-generation LMS architectures were being poured.

    The change in cost can be attributed to several factors:

    • Proliferation of open source: The vast majority of software being built today, regardless of the license it is sold under, makes extensive use of open source frameworks that simply did not exist a decade ago. These commodity components mean that startups today don’t have to pay expensive license fees (for a database, for example) and don’t have to re-invent the wheel building plumbing. They can focus their time and money on the new parts.
    • Growth of cloud technologies: Software isn’t the only thing that has commoditized. One useful way of thinking about the cloud is as the commoditization of hardware. (Importantly for ed tech, this is definitely not the only useful way of thinking about it, but that’s another post for another time.) It’s now easy for companies to get very cheap access to computing power and storage, and to scale that access—and its cost—just-in-time in response to demand.
    • Advances in engineering craft: The development of Agile and Learn approaches to software development and design, when properly applied, can very substantially reduce the number and size of costly mistakes. These mistakes are arguably the most dangerous and costly expenses of digital product creation because they are unpredictable and can cause lasting and cumulative damage that is hard to undo.
    The degree to which existing market entrants can beat back new entrants will depend, in part, on their ability to embrace these innovations. It is simply a lot cheaper and quicker for a new market entrant to build a competitive, full-featured product than it used to be. That isn’t necessarily going to be easy for them. 

  • Blackboard and MoodleRooms: An insight to private equity

    There has been speculation about Blackboard’s acquisition of MoodleRooms and its announcements about support of open-source learning systems. This is also an opportunity to see decision-making by Blackboard owner Providence Equity. The motivation of a private equity firm is rapid increase in the value of its assets. Some of Blackboard initiatives may take several years to take final form; perhaps longer than private equity objectives permit.

    Blackboard describes their software business saying: “We typically license our individual software applications either on a stand-alone basis or bundled as part of one of our six product lines: Blackboard Learn Blackboard Transact Blackboard Connect Blackboard Mobile Blackboard Collaborate and Blackboard Analytics.” Professional services account for 8% of revenue; product for 92%.

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  • There is a Stupid Question: Are You Asking it?

    I hate to say this as a former classroom teacher – there is a stupid question in EdTech.  I have to go on the attack because this question is likely one of the biggest roadblocks to innovation.

     Is Technology Effective?

    The education sector is hung up on this question.  But there are two false assumptions underneath this question that make it one of the few stupid questions you can ask.

    Here are the two deadly assumptions: 1) Technology is homogenous, and 2) Technology is static.

    1) Technology is not homogenous.  To the contrary, Products are different.   There is no such thing as “technology.”  Technology is simply the black box we accept as the term to wrap around things built by invisible layers of computers and machines, advanced science and gobbledegook.  Technology can be pinned more specifically as the methodology, ingredients, or knowledge building blocks used to create new Products.  Technology cannot be effective or ineffective, but Products can be both effective or ineffective, depending on if you are doing the thing the Product is Designed for. That’s a capital D.  Design is an intention manifested in choices.  So, the question is not whether or not technology is effective at increasing outcomes, but rather does this Product do what it is Designed to do?  If not, that doesn’t mean the Product is not worthwhile.  Indeed, most products take years of incubation and Design iteration.  If a Product doesn’t yet do what it is Designed to do, but you believe in the direction, that’s all the more reason to get on board.

    2) Technology is not static.  It moves and moves quickly, and lately Products move so quickly its almost not worth talking about the past as much as the future.  More importantly, technology cannot be separated from the people that make it.  Designing and building a product is now more of a craft than a science, and you need to believe in the artisanship of the people behind it.  What’s happened is that, at least on the Internet, the many layers of the “technology stack” such as languages, servers, memory management, and a bunch of other things that would make my grandma fall asleep, are now open source, figured out, and easy to install, implement, and manage.  This means that coding the Product is now manipulating a smaller layer, involves less code management and investment, and can move so rapidly that small teams of people can push updates weekly if not daily.

    I’ll mention a company I advise called Goalbook.  Goalbook is an Individualized Education Plan management tool that enables the efficient communication of students support teams (teachers, staff, case workers, parents).  This is one of the most profound challenges in all of education, and bringing effectiveness and efficiency to communicating about an IEP will be a giant leap, especially at the K12 level.  Daniel Yoo was a special educator and talented software engineer, and Justin Su rose up through the charter school networks as a technology and innovation guru.  The product is 10x as easy to use and prettier than any current IEP management software, and Daniel and Justin have built a whole product, brought on paying customers, and made thousands of teachers happy on a budget of precisely $0 dollars.  Goalbook has yet to have a true efficacy study.  Does that mean we should stand on the sidelines?  No, this is too important.  We should be demanding great software now for our IEPs, and we should put money where our mouth is and pay Daniel and Justin to build the team to do it.

    So forget the question that educators are tempted to ask: “Is technology effective?”  Also, forget “Does technology produce outcomes?”  I was a teacher in the classroom, and I used to say there are no dumb questions.  But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve certainly realized that some questions reveal a severe deficit in background knowledge.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of, per se, but this one is enough of a barrier to fight back against.  Because Education is so hung up on this dumb question, they never learn the insights that will bring educators to the important ones.

    There are smarter questions:

    Does this product do what it is intended to do?  If not, at what rate is it getting there?  How excited am I for them to succeed?  Do I trust the people that are building it?  Is it worth hanging on?  Is my life going to be better after this problem space is solved for or transformed?

  • What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?

    The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

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  • Blackboard Mergers and Acquisitions

    This is just a quick post to note the fact of two pretty big announcements coming out of Blackboard. First, the acquisition of the company by Providence Equity has been completed. Second, Providence immediately turned around and executed a merger between Blackboard and Edline, makers of an LMS-like product aimed at the K12 market. I haven’t had time to look into the details of this latest move, but it may suggest that Providence believes the K12 market is ready to experience a growth spurt.

  • The Datatel-SunGard Higher Education Merger

    This is a guest post from Jim Farmer, Chairman of Sigma Systems, Inc.

    [Editor’s note: I have had this post from Jim for a while now and am only now getting a chance to publish it. Apologies to Jim and to you.]

    On August 4th Hellman-Friedman LLC filed with the Security and Exchange Commission a planned press release announcing the merger of Datatel and SunGard Higher Education. The SEC filing did note the merger excluded the SunGard Higher Education K-12 Education business, which had been combined with higher education only a few months ago.

    Hellman-Friedman LLC, a private equity firm, and partners own Datatel. Hellman-Friedman was offering $1.775 billion for the higher education part of SunGard Higher Education to create a merged firm..

    SunGard Inc. acquired Systems and Computer Technology (SCT) in February 2004. In March 2005 SunGard Inc. itself was acquired by private equity firm Silver Lakes Partners.

    At that time Campus Technology’s John Savarese summarized the issue:

    In a financial world in which takeovers are often motivated by the desire to achieve economies through radical restructuring or cost-cutting, or where buyers purchase a company because they see the opportunity to quickly sell off assets, customers often have reason to be nervous. And higher ed customers have an added reason to worry: Running a university or college is not just another vertical market; successful software vendors have taken years to tune their offerings to the special needs and operating culture of the campus. Understandably, there is always the concern that new owners may not understand the importance of doing business in the native language of academe.

    Another issue. On April 10th 2011 Peter Thiel—a co-founder of payPal, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist—said “We’re in a Bubble … It’s Higher Education.

    Tech Crunch’s Sarah Lacy reported

    Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in the United States.”

    “Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels.”

    A look at the numbers may suggest Hellman-Friedman alternatives.

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