e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Jim-Farmer

  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” the Advisory Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.,”

    The report was the well-referenced, thoughtful and realistic document and recommendations for which the Committee is known. Higher education should view the report as a warning of the “groundswell of criticism against colleges, bookstores, and publishers” Congress is receiving from constituents already concerned by high and increasing costs of college. Faculty should now be aware cost and effectiveness of learning materials and instructional methods will become an issue. Publishers should accelerate their effort for interoperability and cost reduction.

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  • Coming Soon: Guest Posts by Jim Farmer

    I’m pleased to announce that e-Literate‘s second guest blogger will be Jim Farmer. From his bio:

    Jim Farmer began his career in higher education as CIO for California State University Northridge and became the first CIO for the California State Universities. He was one of the founders of Sigma Systems Inc., a U.S. software supplier for the financial aid community. For eight years he was an associate at the Harvard’s Graduate School of Education teaching strategic planning and information systems. He was CIO at Los Rios Community College District. He was project administrator for JA-SIG’s uPortal project and then the Sakai Community Liaison. He is now affiliated with Georgetown University’s Interoperability Center and is completing a report on open source communities for Oxford University.
    He also consulted for the U.S. Department of Education during their IT Modernization project. Jim has a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma , an S.M. from Harvard University in applied mathematics, and MBA from UCLA. He authored an analysis of the economics of distance learning in the Johns Hopkins University Press book “Public Funding for Higher Education: New Contexts and New Rationales.”

    And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Jim has one of the most interesting and wide-ranging intellects around. Among other things, he has contributed a revealing analysis of Blackboard’s business model and much of the raw materials and behind-the-scenes education regarding edupatents.

    Jim will be making about a half a dozen posts over the coming month or so. Please join me in welcoming him to e-Literate.

  • Jim Farmer on the Impact of the Patent Wars

    Seb Schmoller has posted an insightful, moving, and rather depressing reflection piece by Jim Farmer on the impact that the patent wars will have on education in general. Here’s a sample:

    Education patents and the new licensing environment may further commercialize teaching and learning. The Blackboard patent is not alone, but representative of many that have been issued – and many more that are pending – in the U.S. that could apply to any learning system. It is unlikely that all claims of all patents will be found invalid before someone wins an injunction or judgment, and cease and desist letters and license invoices follow. We should be prepared for a new environment of restrictions, licensing, and confrontation of our suppliers.

    Now any choice of software, any method of instruction, and any choice of content will have to be viewed from a new perspective of risk assessment. This moves the decision from teaching faculty to business officers and attorneys who are least prepared to judge the effect on education and research.

    Sad but true.

  • Resources on the Patent Issue

    Jim Farmer’s company, instructional media + magic, has archived a wealth of patent-related resources in their eLibrary.

  • The Economics of the LMOS

    Jim Farmer has posted a slide stack (in PDF format) on the economics of interoperability. There’s a lot of good general stuff here about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and interoperability issues from a business perspective, but 90%+ can also be read to apply directly to the LMOS concept.

    Here are some highlights:

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  • Survey Gives Proprietary AND Open Source VLE Developers Cause to Worry

    IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Interestingly, the data looks bad for almost everyone. There’s some limited good news for Moodle and Boddington, but as institutions are voting with their feet, the general sentiment seems to be “A pox on all your houses.” (more…)

  • More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"

    Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most important part:

    Software suppliers do not spend on sales and marketing not considered ?necessary.? The costs are driven by customer demands and customer expectations. Enterprise procurements can be very expensive for software suppliers. Requiring extensive proposal responses, large-scale demonstrations using extensive prescribed scripts, and presentations with experts drawn throughout the company are required by customers as a condition of doing business; this is costly.

    Blackboard spends a ton of money to acquire each new customer because they have to. It’s the only way they can successfully run the gauntlet of the higher education sales process often enough to make money. The procurement process itself is broken. It requires proprietary vendors to spend between a quarter and a third of their revenue on sales–money that could be better spent on product development or discounts to customers. It blocks Open Source support vendors that don’t have armies of salespeople from participating in many RFP’s. And, according to Jim’s analysis, it results in a net price increase of as much as 26% for the customers. Everybody loses.

    The good news is that this problem is fixable.

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