e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edunomics

  • On Innovation and Commodification

    I had a wonderful time at the Moodle Moot two weeks ago. Conferences for different LMSs tend to have very similar presentation types (how to migrate, tricks for making the grade book usable, great Web 2.0 tools that integrate with the platform, ways to improve training and help, etc.), but the crowds are different. Moodle Moots tend to be heavy with people who are very pedagogically focused and sophisticated. (They also, apparently, attract a high percentage of iPad owners.) Anyway, it was fun.

    One of the best parts of the experience was getting to spend time with David Wiley (who, in addition to being a pioneer and major driver of OER propagation, is also one of the truly great human beings in the field of educational technology). David and I had dinner the last night of the conference and got to talking about how textbook publishers are moving in the direction of developing platforms that go well beyond the book in terms of what they deliver to students, e.g., Cengage’s MindTap, Pearson’s MyLabs, etc. He asked me whether I think open source and open content could build something similar. I replied that the infrastructure being built around Khan Academy is a step in that direction. David mused that it must be frustrating for textbook publishers to face not only competition from other publishers but also the open content movement constantly working to undermine their business model. I didn’t give him a very good answer that night. This blog post is my attempt to formulate a better one.

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  • The Blackboard Acquisition: Two Views

    As busy as I have been lately, I have tried to keep up on the various analyses of Blackboard’s acquisition by Providence Equity Partners, Inc. There seem to be two schools of thought. The first school, which seems to be getting the most play, is moderately negative for higher education. The second school, which I’ve seen gestured to in a few places here and there but never fully and clearly articulated, is neutral to positive for education.

    I honestly don’t know which of these analyses is more accurate. Both are grounded in the known behaviors and motivations of private equity firms like Providence. Neither is supported by a lot of publicly available information specific to this deal. But the facts will come. My goal with this post is to provide a framework through which the facts we learn in the future can be interpreted by comparing them to one hypothesis or the other.

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  • Investment Bankers and Blackboard’s Future, Part One: If …

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, Chairman of Sigma Group Inc.

    On Friday July 1,st after this was written, Blackboard Inc. was acquired by “affiliates of Providence Equity Partners” for $1.64 billion. They will also assume approximately $130 million in net debt. Providence will pay $45 per share; it closed Thursday at $43.38.

    The Washington Business Journal reported:

    The transaction is anticipated to close during the fourth quarter of 2011. Upon closing Blackboard will become a privately held company, remain headquartered in Washington and continue to be led by its existing senior management team.

    This suggests a more complex deal than the publicly available information suggests.

    Blackboard’s April 19, 2011 press release reads; “Blackboard (NASDAQ: BBBB) today announced that it has retained Barclay’s Capital as its financial advisor in response to receiving unsolicited, non-binding proposals to acquire the company.” On Thursday, June 23, The Chronicle of Higher Education, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported: “Providence Equity could announce a deal to buy Blackboard, Inc. as early as next week [the week of June 27 – July 1].”

    If this acquisition is completed, ((Editor’s Note: While Blackboard and Providence have agreed on the acquisition, the deal doesn’t close until the fourth quarter of 2011. Acquisition agreements sometimes do fall apart before they close, although there is no particular reason to think that this one will.)) the question then turns to the impact it will have on higher education.

    From the Wall Street perspective Blackboard is a very successful and well managed company. The founders’ goal at Cornell University was to save faculty time by automating typical faculty communications with students, and making the administrative tasks of a lecture more convenient for students. Since then, through software development and recent acquisitions, Blackboard has a suite of complementary learning applications. Blackboard’s learning management products have become a successful source of revenue. Some acquisitions products, such as Blackboard Connect, seem to be leading in their market segment.

    However, the expectation of private equity firms for earnings exceeds Blackboard’s 2010 earnings. A combination of higher prices for annual software licenses and reduction of staff and lower services will, in the short run, be needed to achieve this higher profitability.

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  • Desire2Learn Product Updates

    I had a chance to speak to some folks about their latest product release (9.2) a couple of weeks back and am only now finding time to blog about it.

    First, there’s what they’re doing with the LMS itself. No surprise, one of their areas of focus is on user experience improvement, with reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform tasks being a prominent item on the agenda. Pretty much all the LMS developers are working on this right now. One fundamental problem with LMS design in general has always been that it’s a Swiss army knife. Everything is crammed into it. That’s not a recipe for great usability. On top of that, the fundamental user experience architecture of all these platforms is now about a decade old. It’s built in the model of enterprise groupware circa 2000, when people are increasingly expecting an experience consistent with Web 2.0 software circa 2010. So a facelift is in order. A second thing they are doing is embedding audio recording wherever attachments can be done in the UI. Ubiquitous audio and video recording are going to be pretty much required in an LMS platform within a year or two.

    But beyond that, D2L is putting a lot of effort to fine tune their rubric, learning objective, selective release, assessment, and content modules to make it easier for schools to move in the direction of competency modeling and adaptive learning. This is not an easy path for an institution to follow, so D2L is putting a lot of care into lowering the barriers, both by making it easy to approach the problem piecemeal (e.g., no longer requiring learning objectives in order to use rubrics) while simultaneously making it easy to add new pieces once you’ve started (e.g., enabling selective release to trigger off of rubric scores). To my mind, this web that D2L is weaving could be their compelling functional differentiator. Time will tell.

    We also talked about the company’s mobile strategy. D2L has no less than three mobile products now. The first, Desire2Learn 2Go, is a native app that links to the LMS. Right now it is Blackberry-only. 2Go is the company’s consumer-oriented product, which they envision being downloaded by students directly from smart phone app stores. Desire2Learn Mobile Web is essentially their browser-based product that fills roughly the same needs as 2Go, i.e., it’s mainly student learning-oriented. And finally their new product, Desire2Learn Campus Life, is a mobile campus portal that competes with Blackboard’s Mobile Central. It supports pushing a variety of apps—campus calendar, campus news, dining hall info, sports info, etc.—to mobile apps for Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This release is focused on getting pre-built functionality out the door, while next release will be more about delivering an SDK so that campuses can develop their own apps. When I asked D2L about what their differentiators are vis-a-vis Mobile Central, their answer was basically “stay tuned.” The mobile campus portal space is quickly becoming crowded with players like SunGard getting into the game and the Jasig community announcing the start of the uMobile initiative, so it should be interesting to watch.

    Finally, my old friend Al Essa, former Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and former CIO of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, will be heading up the development of D2L’s analytics product. Al is a deep thinker who has been focused on learning analytics for the past couple of years. I look forward to seeing what he can cook up in the next year or two.

    My talk with D2L happened before their announcement about acquiring a lecture capture hardware and software product suite, so I don’t have anything new to add regarding that development at the moment.

  • The Blackboard/Moodle FOIA Requests

    Vicki Tambellini is reporting that a number of colleges who moved from Blackboard to Moodle are getting hit with Freedom of Information Act requests:

    Last week a number of institutions received FOIA requests from a law firm in Columbia, South Carolina.  The firm requests everything related to individual LMS procurements from the RFP process through the implementation.According to the letter I read,  Schmidt Copeland wants information that includes everything from procurement notes and evaluation materials to RFP responses in procurements where Blackboard was replaced by Moodle solutions.  The firm leaves no request unmentioned:  communications with vendors, consultants and recordings.  They want post-selection operating information including staffing, budgets and communications including trouble tickets.

    The request includes system loss, performance and up-time data requests.  Oh, and they’d like it in 10 days, please.  And in a less than subtle statement, the firm reminds the institution that if they don’t comply, it’s a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $750!

    I can confirm that at least one school in my area has received such a request.

    So what is this about?

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  • The Changing Dynamics of the Educational Technology Markets

    Phil Hill has two good blog posts up in response to Blackboard’s announcement that it has received at least two “unsolicited non-binding proposals” for the company to be acquired. In his first post, Phil argues that, whatever the outcome of the bidding, Blackboard’s brand value will be hurt:

    In one dramatic shift, Blackboard has gone from the known to the unknown.  For years, one of Blackboard’s greatest sales strength was the message that it was here to stay.  Unlike that pesky Desire2Learn, who might succumb to lawyer’s bills and the patent fight, Blackboard was a solid investment with the corporate muscle to be here for the long haul.  Unlike those pesky open source providers, who might disappear or stop developing, Blackboard presented “one throat to choke” and was reliable.  Now, can anyone reliably guess what’s going to happen to Blackboard, who will provide services, whether the roadmap will completely change?

    This sales advantage is now gone.

    I’m somewhat agonistic on this point. I see Phil’s argument, but the size of the impact may be significantly different depending on whether the acquirer somebody like McGraw Hill, somebody like News Corp., or if no acquisition comes through (which I think is the most likely scenario). I don’t have a strong gut feeling about how much this changes the sales conversation.

    In his second post, Phil takes issue with one of my previous posts:

    Michael is right and you should read the whole post and its second part, but I have a different opinion on the conclusions.  I agree with the conclusions that…

    by 2014 we may see it beginning to change the whole picture for educational technology infrastructure in some fundamental ways. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be an interesting ride.,

    but I am less inclined to rely on straight-line projections of market data to look ahead, and am more inclined to think the market changes we are seeing are driven by outside forces with potentially nonlinear effects.  Rome may have been weakened from within, but when real change happened, the Visigoths made it happen….

    Today, there is a flood of new money into the educational technology market.  In addition to the potential acquisition of Blackboard, Instructure just raised $8M in venture funding and vying for the role of Alaric in their marketing position, Pearson has been heavily investing in Learning Studio (eCollege for you old-timers), and Moodlerooms raised $7+M in venture funding.  Publishing companies, ERP vendors, private equity, venture funding – these are major disruptive forces.  And there is still significant moves being made by technology companies such as Google.

    Whatever happens with the potential acquisition of Blackboard, expect to see a different market emerge, with new dynamics.  For higher education institutions – is your academic technology strategy ready to handle the changes in the market?

    I’m not sure that we actually disagree. I also believe that there are some pretty massive changes taking place in the educational technology markets. The only question I would raise is whether those changes will hit quickly enough to substantially change the likely outcome of the evaluations that WebCT and ANGEL customers are going to have to complete in the next 24 months.

    Let’s dig into the details a little and see what we can figure out.

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  • Moodlerooms and the Cambridge Global Grid for Learning

    I know it’s been a little quiet here on e-Literate since I started gearing up for my (awesome) new job. Posts are likely to be sporadic for a while longer yet. But fear not, Dear Reader, for I have not forgotten you. I do have a backlog of posts that I intend to get to whenever I can squeeze out some time.

    I’m going to start with a topic that’s been in my queue for some time now. A while back, I wrote a post comparing Moodlerooms’ content deal with Cambridge University Press to Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. It turns out that my assumptions about that deal were wrong. This matters for several reasons. First, I take pride in giving you accurate information, and in this case I didn’t. But beyond that, the nature of these deals can tell us a lot both about the shifting landscape of the relationships between LMS providers and publishers as well as the growth of new sustainability models for educational content. Both of these dynamics will be important to watch.

    Cambridge Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) is a new and somewhat experimental division of Cambridge University Press. They refer to themselves as “digital content brokers.” They aggregate content from about 40 different providers, such as Reuters and Corbis. They then hand curate the content, weeding out items that aren’t appropriate (their current target market is primary and secondary, although they have plans for higher and further education) and tag it in ways that will make it easier for teachers to find. The assets are pretty granular, so articles and images and videos rather than whole courses. But all items in the collection have been copyright cleared for use in courses. GGfL has plans to begin pulling OERs into their collection as well, thus providing a single portal for finding free and fee content.

    Pricing is relatively cheap. Right now, a high school can license their entire library for $1,795 USD. Their current model is one license for everything, but they eventually want to provide license options by collection or even by asset, and they want to link the content to metadata on learning outcomes. And contrary to my earlier reporting, their deal with Moodlerooms is quite different than Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. According to Tom Murdock, Moodlerooms’ co-founder and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms customers will all have access to a basic GGfL subscription bundled with their Moodlerooms support contract, with the option to upgrade their GGfL contract for a fee. In return, GGfL will promote Moodlerooms to their customers who may be looking for an LMS. Unlike the Blackboard/MGH deal, which is essentially a portal deal in which MGH pays Blackboard for access to their customers, the Moodlerooms/GGfL deal is a cross-selling partnership. No money is actually changing hands between the two companies.