e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edunomics

  • Desire2Learn Sues UEN Over Instructure Contract

    This was reported in The Salt Lake Tribune and, more recently, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As I have mentioned here previously, startup LMS developer Instructure recently won an LMS bid for the 140,000-student Utah Education Network (UEN).  Now, UEN, as a consortium of public schools, is bound by state laws regarding contract bidding. In their complaint, Desire2Learn alleges that (a) an employee of Instructure had been an employee of UEN or one of its membership schools at the time that the selection criteria were created and was involved with their creation (which would presumably be a violation of state conflict of interest laws) and (b) that UEN didn’t follow the selection criteria published in its RFP (which would presumably be a violation of the state’s procurement laws).

    These suits are a lot more common than most people realize. They usually happen either (a) because there genuinely was an unfair selection process (which definitely happens) or (b) because the litigating company is just using the lawsuit as a competitive bludgeon (which also definitely happens). It’s not immediately clear from the publicly available data which might be the case here. Certainly, nothing I have seen or heard yet comes remotely close to being a smoking gun regarding misconduct in the selection process. But there’s not much that’s publicly available yet.

    Here’s what we do know that should put some context around this:

    • According to Utah state law, if a company thinks there was something amiss with an award process, that company has five days to file a protest with the organization that granted the award.
    • Desire2Learn did file a protest within five days.
    • If the protest is rejected, then the challenging company has fourteen days to file an appeal.
    • UEN did reject D2L’s protest, and D2L did file for an appeal within fourteen days.
    • In order to get access to the kind of information that would, in fact, show whether there had been any hanky panky in the selection process, you’d need to request the process documentation from UEN via Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), which is the state’s equivalent to the Federal Freedom of Information Act.
    • Given the way these bureaucratic information request processes go, it is very likely that any company that thinks there might have been misconduct would have to file suit before it was able to gain access to the information that they’d need to prove it. This encourages a practice of filing a placeholder lawsuit before the facts are in.

    Based on the above, it might not make sense to read too much into this lawsuit at this point. At the moment, all we can be sure of is that Desire2Learn is preserving their right to challenge the decision. We won’t really get a sense of the true nature of the suit or the motives of the company until we get a few more moves into the chess game. I will report on the developments as I learn more.

    As a side note, I think it is important for these sorts of challenges to be more widely known in the education community whenever they happen, for transparency’s sake. If anybody is aware of such challenges taking place, please let me know.

    I have published both Desire2Learn’s protest and UEN’s response below the fold.

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  • Duke Moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai

    As I wrote in an earlier post, defections of Blackboard Enterprise customers to other LMS platforms might be an indicator of a greater market share movement that we’ve seen in the past because, absent any forced migration, schools just don’t change LMSs very often. Well, Duke has announced that they are moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai. Particularly interesting is their reasoning for undertaking an LMS evaluation in the first place:

    Since future versions of Blackboard are significantly different than the current Blackboard 8, any upgrade would necessitate a fair amount of change for users. [Emphasis added.] On top of that, Duke’s needs and priorities have shifted in the 10+ years since we first adopted Blackboard as the campus LMS. This plus the fact that our Blackboard license is up for renewal in July 2012 suggests that it is a good time to review the LMS “landscape” and determine if Blackboard is still the best system to meet Duke faculty, student and strategic needs.

    It sounds as though the Duke folks thought that the changes from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9 were large enough that they amounted to a forced migration. They passed the threshold of user retraining beyond which you might as well look at all options.

    This is always a tough dilemma for developers of software with a significant installed base. You need to evolve your software to keep up with the competition, but in doing so, you force your users to deal with change, when not requiring them to change has been one of your competitive advantages. The challenge for Blackboard is that they face this dilemma at a time when they are also putting their WebCT and ANGEL customers through a forced migration. So if the move to Blackboard 9  from Blackboard 8 is also perceived as, effectively, a forced migration, then that means an alarmingly high percentage of their LMS customers might be looking around at alternatives.

    I’m interested in hearing from people who have experience with both Blackboard 9.x and 8.x. In your opinion, is it really a big change? How much user retraining does it require?

  • How Do You Choose Your Textbook?

    This is a question for e-Literate readers who are teachers. I’m trying to understand how instructors in different disciplines choose their books for a class. My sense is that it varies widely by discipline. For example, my wife teaches a lot of English Composition, so the didactic manual isn’t as important as the anthology of short stories and/or essays. I would imagine that her selection criteria for a good anthology would be quite different than, say, a macroeconomics professor looking for a good textbook. And the macroeconomics professor, in turn, might have very different criteria than an art history professor.

    All of this matters because it will have a profound influence on how content is digitized, disaggregated, and made available under open licenses. The change is likely to be different discipline by discipline, depending on how well the decision process of the faculty works in the new digital world. Many composition teachers would probably like a world in which they could assemble their own anthologies. On the other hand, if you’re an economics professor who tends to use Greg Mankiw’s book because you like his overall take on economics, a disaggregated, digital world might offer you a different set of pros and cons.

    So I’m asking: How do you choose your texts for class? Do you go by publisher/brand? By author? Do you look for a particular theme? Do you think about cost for the students, or open licenses? Is convenience a factor? Please let me know in the comments thread, and please don’t forget to tell me what subject you teach as part of your answer.

  • A Big Vista to Blackboard 9.1 Win

    Following up on my two-part series on the changing LMS market, I am going to write short posts noting LMS evaluation decisions of Vista, Blackboard Enterprise, and select ANGEL customers (as well as any others that seem noteworthy) when I hear of them. Today, via Ray Henderson’s tweet, I note that the San Diego Community College District (131,403 students) has chosen to migrate from Vista to Blackboard 9.1.

  • Higher Education Recession: A new role for information technologists?

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Jim is Chairman of instructional media + magic.

    Monday, 11 October the Browne report, “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education,” was released in the UK. ((A copy of the Browne report is available here. Information from the JISC CETIIS Conferences can be found at the JISC web site. Inside Higher Education referenced the Times Higher Education article describing both the report and reaction—largely critical. There was also a separate commentary by editor Doug Lederman.)) If implemented there will be major cuts in funds available to U.K. universities and higher tuition for students. The combination of less funding and higher enrollment is also the new future in the U.S. Even more and bigger funding limits are expected next year. A combination of lower state revenues, higher costs, and limits on federal funding when stimulus funds will no longer be available will impact available funds..

    Although UK universities pleaded, and continue to plead, for more funding, the Joint Information Systems Committee began quietly more than 5 years ago to develop a capability for information technologists to contribute to a unified managed IT service for better university planning.

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  • SunGard Delivers Sakai Support Through rSmart Partnership

    This is pretty big news. SunGard will be providing Sakai support services to its customers. If you’re interested in Sakai, you can contract with SunGard to get help migrating, setting up integration, and training faculty, as well as ongoing hosting and support. They’ll be doing this, in part, through a partnership in which rSmart is basically subcontracted by SunGard to provide the hosting and support subscription services. This is great news for both companies, SunGard’s customers, and the Sakai community in general, the latter of which I expect to expand substantially because of this development. But this also provides a textbook case of just how well open source and open standards can work to provide better offerings in the marketplace when they are working well. People who don’t have experience with them—particularly with open source—often scratch their heads at how they can possibly work out. In fact, open source allows for the unbundling of services that are typically tied together in a private source vendor model, opening up new possibilities for business models and risk management strategies. Open standards enhance that flexibility while creating new opportunities for collaboration among even competing vendors.

    Let’s take a closer look at how this deal works for each of the parties involved.

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  • Xplana.com: Is This a PLE?

    The title of this post is slightly tongue-in-cheek because I have my doubts about whether there is such a thing as PLEs that are distinct from existing software product categories. If there were, then after years of people talking about them, one would think there would have been an example by now that everybody could point to and say, “Yes, we all agree that is a Personal Learning Environment and not a Learning Management System, a Virtual Learning Environment, an ePortfolio, an RSS reader, a personal portal, or whatever.” Then again, maybe the PLE is an idea whose time has finally come. I believe that learning environment developers are embracing many of the articulated values behind the PLE and experimenting with different ways to embody those values. Xplana.com, which launched this week, is one example.

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