e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edunomics

  • Global Trends in Education Costs?

    I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with Rosa Maria Torres regarding Anya Kamenetz’s graph on the cost of higher education in the U.S. She made the fair point that the graph should be labeled so that readers know the data is for the United States (which I have now done). She also asserted that the trend is probably true for OECD countries in general but maybe not for others. Since it was Twitter, we couldn’t really have a full conversation about it, but her assertion makes me curious. First of all, I’d love to see comparative data on the costs of education over time for different geographical regions. But this wouldn’t really get at the heart of the matter, since many countries in the developing world are at very different points in the higher education adoption/diffusion curve than the developed world. So it’s hard to tell from a data snapshot whether some countries are on a different trajectory or just on a different place in the same trajectory.

    What I’d like to know is whether there are alternative school funding models in the developing world that people believe are (a) likely to be sustainable based on an established track record and real data, and (b) avoid some of the structural features of Western (or Northern) educational institutions and funding mechanisms that lead to massive inflation.

  • Why Higher Education Is In Trouble–In One Graph

    Here’s a graph from a recent presentation by Anya Kamenetz:

    U.S. Tuition Costs Over Time

    The word that comes to mind is “Yikes!”

    Here’s the full preso:

  • The iPad and the iLabs

    There’s just so much to like about the LetterMPress project:

    To begin with, I found it on KickStarter, a great site for crowd funding art projects that I learned about thanks to my friends at smARThistory. (There’s still one day left to donate to their project!) There’s something very satisfying about direct micro-funding of local projects that you believe in. My wife and I have been giving micro-lending gift certificates to friends and family via Kiva for years, and we’re probably going to fund our first classroom project on Donors Choose very soon.

    Second, there’s the software. A direct manipulation interface that provides a high-fidelity simulation of the analog world is something that just sings on a touch-enabled device. Could you do something like this on a traditional computer using a mouse? Sure. But there’s something about touch, about transforming the screen into an object that you can manipulate with your own hands, that just seems new and fresh and powerful. In this case, it’s helping to keep alive an art that is in danger of being lost, and it’s doing so through a direct, physical interface with the art-making.

    But the best part is that the digital interface, including the individual type elements, will be connected to a physical letterpress facility where people can have their digital letterpress creations transformed into real, honest-to-goodness letterpress-created analog art. It’s about as close as you can come to giving everybody their own physical letterpress. The approach reminds me of MIT’s iLabs, where students can have remote access to real lab facilities that are difficult and/or expensive to reproduce every place where you might have students that want to learn using the labs. Of course, one of the shortcomings of virtual labs is that students don’t gain the hands-on skills that they need to have in order to work in a real-life lab. I wonder whether a high-fidelity simulation on a touch interface would make a difference in terms of those skill deficits. It may turn out that touch will be much more important and useful than 3D in terms of creating high-value educational simulations. This would be particularly true in cases where the touch-based simulation could actually drive physical, real-world equipment so students could see the actual reality mirroring the virtual one. One other nice wrinkle to the LetterMPress implementation of this approach is that the simulation is only loosely coupled to the physical equipment. Students can practice and experiment as much as they want with their digital tools and submit their designs for real-world processing only when they’re ready.

    So, to sum up, LetterMPress gives us the following:

    • A high-fidelity, real-feeling simulation of an environment in which learners and practitioners can play
    • The ability to run the simulation on rare and expensive physical equipment at a distance
    • Through a combination of Kick-starter and an innovative business model, a way for individuals interested in preserving the art to make an investment that matters

    Pretty cool.

    If you’re interested in participating, you can donate to the LetterMPress KickStarter project. A donation of $25 gets you a copy of the app when it’s finished and a T-shirt.

  • Interview with Lou Pugliese

    For my first attempt at a Skype video interview, I was fortunate to be joined by Moodlerooms CEO Lou Pugliese. Unfortunately, the network gods were not with us; the picture is extremely fuzzy. But the audio is quite good and well worth your time. Lou is an interesting guy. He started out as a journalist, got into online learning early, was Blackboard’s first CEO, worked with VCs for a while, and now is leading one of the fastest growing open source LMS support vendors around.

    On a related note, I’m in the process of doing some more research on the Moodlerooms/Cambridge University Press relationship. I was mistaken when I assumed that it was similar to the Blackboard/McGraw Hill deal. There are some interesting wrinkles to it, which I’ll report as soon as I have the details nailed down.

    By the way, I’m looking for input on these interviews. Is an hour too long? Are you listening to the whole thing? Are there ways that I could make it more likely that you would? Making a podcasting feed available on iTunes, for example?

  • Instructure Goes Open Source

    Update: The video was briefly broken as Instructure inexplicably chose the day after their big announcement to change their YouTube account. I have updated the post with the new URL and it should be working now. Note that anybody else who linked to Instructure’s videos before today is going to have the same problem. The new channel for Instructure’s videos is http://www.youtube.com/canvaslms.

    Instructure has just announced that they will be releasing an open source version of their Canvas LMS product. Between this announcement, the winning of the Utah Education Network contract (109,000 college students and 40,000 K12 students), and the oh-so-ever-brief lawsuit by Desire2Learn about that win, Instructure has been making quite a splash lately. In this post, I’m going to look a little more closely at the company, the software, and the business model.

    (more…)

  • CSU Chico Upgrades from Vista to Blackboard 9.1

    As a follow-up to my two–part series on LMS market share, I am tracking news development about adoption announcements, particularly of Vista schools. Today brings word that CSU Chico is moving from Vista to Blackboard 9.1.

  • Desire2Learn Drops UEN Suit

    I was able to speak with Desire2Learn Director of Marketing John McLeod to confirm that his comment on my previous post means what it appears to mean:

    All vendors enter every RFP process with the view that the process will be fair and equitable. We all invest resources to respond to RFPs, make presentations, and demonstrate our capabilities. In virtually every case, we accept the decision.

    Michael is correct, Utah law requires that a protest be made within 5 days of a decision, and an appeal – which must be filed in court – be made within 14 days of a denial. We have requested materials under Utah’s freedom of information laws. We will carefully review the materials when we receive them to better understand this process.

    Out of respect for institutions in Utah and our desire to concentrate on serving our customers, we are immediately dropping this appeal. We want to reassure everyone that our focus continues to be on improving education.

    On the phone, John re-iterated that Desire2Learn’s motivation was to better understand the decision-making process and making sure that it was fair.

    It would behoove colleges and universities to become more sophisticated about this sort of thing. On the one hand, ethics laws exist for a reason and, as one commenter on the previous post noted, it is perfectly reasonable for a company to want to ensure that those ethics laws were followed. (I recommend reading the whole comments thread, by the way; the range of perspectives is interesting.) On the other hand, these challenges definitely get abused sometimes. So it should be routine for schools to share information about these sorts of things when they happen, but also to be careful to get all the facts. Every situation is different.

    In fact, this whole situation might have played out differently had more of the details of the process been pro-actively published in the first place. That’s not a criticism of UEN; I recognize that there are all kinds of reasons why it is difficult (and sometimes even legally impossible) to share some of this. But in general, I do think that schools would benefit greatly by taking a position of publishing all evaluation process information by default and only making private what needs to be private, rather than the other way around. This change would require some non-trivial rethinking of processes and policies, as well as significant extra work, but the end result would be better contract negotiations based on shared data and best practices from peer schools as well as fewer (though higher quality) challenges after the fact.