e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Higher Ed

  • Education M&A Activity in 2013: Still growing, but changing

    Like it or not, education is an industry, and much of the change we see affecting higher ed and K-12 institutions is driven by investment from the private sector. It can be useful to get a high-level view of the trends in private investments to help understand where private companies (edtech vendors, publishers, for-profit institutions, etc) are likely to move in the future.

    According to a new year-end report from Berkerey Noyes, a US-based investment banker, merger and acquisition activity in the education industry continued to grow in 2013, with the 9 of the 10 largest deals occurring outside of the US. As summarized at Education Week:

    A number of recent reports have shown or predicted a strong and growing demand for various educational products and services in markets such as Latin America, and the new, year-end report on transactions published by Berkery Noyes would seem to reinforce that portrait.

    “The big education players are acquiring to help manage the transition from print to digital,” Peter Yoon, managing director of Berkery Noyes’ education group, said in an interview. He said they’re also moving to “strengthen their presence in emerging markets.”

    The most active acquirer was Pearson PLC, with six deals that included the “acquisition of Grupo Multi Holding, an English language training company headquartered in Brazil, for $829 million”.

    In total there were 295 transactions for a total of $10.2 billion in value, which represented year-over-year growth of 8 and 27% respectively.

    Summary

    Beyond the international growth, there are two other items that jumped out at me – the shift towards strategic buyers and the strong growth in professional training.

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  • State of the Anglosphere’s Higher Education LMS Market: 2013 Edition

    I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in September 2012, and thanks to new data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data provides an anchor for the summary.

    What I’ve been attempting to do lately is to expand the market definition beyond the US. Last year I used some heuristics:

    LMS_MarketShare_20121018-Home

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  • e-Literate TV trailer from EDUCAUSE 2013

    Last week Michael announced a new project of ours called e-Literate TV. To recap, the idea is that there are new groups involved in decisions that impact ed tech and online education. Deans, provosts, presidents, boards of trustees, state legislators, and even national media are newly interested in topics with different levels of understanding and different perspectives.

    This new situation can be frustrating for e-learning professionals who have been involved in ed tech for years, but we cannot and should not wish away this new interest. Instead, there is an opportunity to develop new ways to engage the various groups in discussions about the usage of technology to enable change in education.

    This is the goal of e-Literate TV. One way we see e-Literate TV being used is by e-learning professionals sharing easy-to-consume ~10-minute videos with various stake holders as a method to enable more productive conversations. As such, all of the video segments will come with a creative commons license for easy sharing.

    What event is complete without a cool tee shirt?
    What event is complete without a cool tee shirt?

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  • What does Devlin Daley’s departure mean for Instructure?

    Despite all the media hype on MOOCs over the past two years, perhaps the most important recent market entry for ed tech has been Canvas, the LMS from Instructure. Instructure was founded in 2008 by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley. At the time Brian and Devlin were graduate students at BYU who had just taken a class taught by Josh Coates, where their assignment was to come up with a product and business model to address a specific challenge. Brian and Devlin chose the LMS market based on the poor designs and older architectures dominating the market. This design led to the founding of Instructure, with Josh eventually providing seed funding and becoming CEO by 2010.

    Michael covered the burst of news in January 2011 that served as the launch of Canvas.

    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.

    Since that time Instructure has grown to 7M+ users, 500 customers and 240 employees while raising $50M in total VC funding. With that much early success, it was a surprise to see Devlin Daley leave the company as of last week with his Douglas Adams reference. (more…)

  • Cal State’s New Online Concurrent Enrollment Program: A Student’s View

    Michael and I have written about California’s efforts to leverage online education to address the challenge of students having access to needed courses, but it would help to hear what students have to say. Towards that end, I am sharing a student newspaper article about Cal State’s new online concurrent enrollment program. The student is my daughter, Hillary Hill, who is in her third year at Sonoma State University. You can find the original article here.

    As a student attending a school that is part of the California State University system, specifically Sonoma State University, I know the dread and frustration associated with registering for classes.

    In some ways, it seems like we are being set up to fail; we have a 16 unit cap, registration times get mixed up, and it seems like every class you need is full after five minutes.

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  • You know what would help MOOC articles? Getting the facts and goals right before analyzing

    Keith Devlin has an article at Huffington Post today titled “MOOC Mania Meets the Sober Reality of Education”. The premise is that the halting of the San Jose State University (SJSU) / Udacity pilot project and of SB 520 show that naive assumptions on the power of MOOCs to disrupt higher education are insufficient in reality – education is too complex. While the overall article has some good points, the very foundation of the article is flawed.

    I have written about both issues – SJSU program and SB 520 – and agree that there were flaws in both. Michael and I co-wrote a position paper for 20 Million Minds Foundation making recommendations to change and improve California legislation, and we have been critical of overly-simplistic views of higher education disruption. But authors should at least characterize the goals of each program accurately before drawing conclusions. The HuffingtonPost article has three glaring problems that undercut its entire message.

    Problem 1: Getting the explicit goals wrong

    Devlin begins:

    Politicians who saw MOOCs as a means to cut the cost of higher education are having to think again after two high-profile initiatives in California recently came to a crashing halt.

    Did politicians see “MOOCs as a means to cut the cost of higher education” in both of these programs? Let’s look at the stated goals for the SJSU program:

    This marks the first time that a broad and diverse range of students, not just matriculated students, will have access to online college classes for credit from an accredited university at a very affordable price of $150 per course, about the same as a course at the California Community Colleges.

    The pilot’s target population includes underserved groups such as high school students who will earn college credit, waitlisted students at California Community Colleges who would otherwise face out-of-state or private options, and members of the armed forces and veterans. [emphasis original]

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  • Moodle has quietly become the dominant LMS for online service providers

    One subject that we have not covered much at e-Literate lately is the market position of Moodle. Given the significant LMS market changes over the past two years, it might be worth considering how institutions are adopting and using Moodle. In the US at least, there has been a significant change – whereas in previous years Moodle growth came primarily from institutions moving away from Blackboard, today much of the growth appears to have shifted to online service providers.

    Traditional US Market

    From 2006 – 2011 Moodle grew quickly in the US, both in terms of the number of users (students, faculty) and in terms of the number of schools adopting Moodle. This growth appears to have slowed considerably since 2011, although the data can be difficult to interpret since the system is open source – anyone can download for free and run Moodle, without even notifying Moodle headquarters or often the institution.

    While the data is inconclusive, my assumption is that traditional Moodle growth – institutions adopting the LMS as the campus standard, typically moving away from Blackboard or WebCT – has significantly slowed from its peak growth in 2009 – 2011. I’ll write a separate post on this subject in the future.

    New Growth Model

    While the traditional growth may have slowed, there is a market segment in the US where Moodle is quietly dominating – as the preferred learning platform (or LMS) for online service providers.

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