e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Engagement

  • LoudCloud Systems and FASTRAK: A non walled-garden approach to CBE

    As competency-based education (CBE) becomes more and more important to US higher education, it would be worth exploring the learning platforms in use. While there are cases of institutions using their traditional LMS to support a CBE program, there is a new market developing specifically around learning platforms that are designed specifically for self-paced, fully-online, competency-framework based approaches.

    Recently I saw a demo of the new CBE platform from LoudCloud Systems, a company whose traditional LMS I have covered a few years ago. The company is somewhat confusing to me – I had expected a far larger market impact from them based on their product design than what has happened in reality. LoudCloud has recently entered the CBE market, not by adding features to their core LMS but by creating a new product called FASTRAK. Like Instructure with their creation of a new LMS for a different market (corporate learning), LoudCloud determined that CBE called for a new design and that the company can handle two platforms for two mostly distinct markets. In the case of Bridge and FASTRAK, I believe the creation of a new learning platform took approximately one year (thanks a lot, Amazon). LoudCloud did leverage several of the traditional LMS tools such as rubrics, discussion forums and their LoudBook interactive eReader.

    As was the case for the description of the Helix CBE-based learning platform and the description of FlatWorld’s learning platform, my interest here is not merely to review one company’s products, but rather to illustrate aspects of the growing CBE movement using the demo.

    LoudCloud’s premier CBE partner is the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center, a part of the College of Education that provides professional development for Florida’s 55,000 early learning teachers. They have or expect to have more than a dozen pilot programs for CBE in place during the first half of 2015. (more…)

  • Flat World and CBE: Self-paced does not imply isolation

    As competency-based education (CBE) becomes more and more important to US higher education, it would be worth exploring the learning platforms in use. While there are cases of institutions using their traditional LMS to support a CBE program, there is a new market developing specifically around learning platforms that are designed specifically for self-paced, fully-online, competency-framework based approaches.

    Several weeks ago Flat World announced their latest round of funding, raising $5 million of debt financing, raising their total to $40.7 million. The company started out by offering full e-textbooks (and was previously named FlatWorld Knowledge), developing 110 titles that included 25 of the 50 most-used lecture courses. The e-textbook market was not working out, however, and the company pivoted to competency-based education around the time that Chris Etesse became CEO two years ago. Now the company is developing a combined CBE learning platform with integrated course content – much of it repurposing the pre-existing e-textbook materials. Their first academic partner for CBE is Brandman University, a non-traditional part of the Chapman University system and is currently one of the CBEN network.

    One central tenet of the Flat World approach is based on their history and pivot – a tight integration of content and platform. As Etesse describes it, content is a 1st-class citizen in their system whereas other loosely-coupled approaches that do not tie content and platform together can be difficult to navigate and collect learning analytics. In other words, this intentionally is a walled-garden approach. For Brandman, approximately 70% of the content comes from the pre-existing FlatWorld texts, 25% comes from various OER sources, and about 5% has been custom-designed for Brandman.

    In other words, this is very much a walled garden by design. While there is support for outside content, I believe this integration must be done by Flat World designers.

    As was the case for the description of the Helix CBE-based learning platform, my interest here is not merely to review one company’s products, but rather to illustrate aspects of the growing CBE movement using the demo. (more…)