e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Joel Dehlin

  • Year-end Updates on e-Literate News Posts

    For my final 2014 post, I thought it would be interesting to provide year-end updates to some news posts on e-Literate over the past year. You’ll notice that there is somewhat of an emphasis on negative stories or implications. For most positive stories, companies and institutions are typically all too happy to send out press releases with the associated media paraphrasing, and we have little need here to cover as news. The following non-exhaustive list is in date order.

    D2L Growth Claims

    In December 2013 I described layoffs at Desire2Learn (now officially named D2L). The significance of this story is that it calls into question D2L’s growth claims and trumpeting of massive new investment of $85 million. Some updates:

    IPEDS Data on Online Learning

    (more…)

  • e-Literate Top 20 Posts For 2014

    I typically don’t write year-end reviews or top 10 (or 20) lists, but I need to work on our consulting company finances. At this point, any distraction seems more enjoyable than working in QuickBooks.

    We’ve had a fun year at e-Literate, and one recent change is that we are now more willing break stories when appropriate. We typically comment on ed tech stories a few days after the release, providing analysis and commentary, but there are several cases where we felt a story needed to go public. In such cases (e.g. Unizin creation, Cal State Online demise, management changes at Instructure and Blackboard) we tend to break the news objectively, providing mostly descriptions and explanations, allowing others to provide commentary.

    The following list is based on Jetpack stats on WordPress, which does not capture people who read posts through RSS feeds (we send out full articles through the feed). So the stats have a bias towards people who come to e-Literate for specific articles rather than our regular readers. We also tend to get longer-term readership of articles over many months, so this list also has a bias for articles posted a while ago.

    With that in mind, here are the top 20 most read articles on e-Literate in terms of page views for the past 12 months along with publication date.

    1. Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube? (Dec 2013) – This article proves that people are willing to read a 7,000 word post published on New Year’s Eve.
    2. A response to USA Today article on Flipped Classroom research (Oct 2013) – This article is our most steady one, consistently getting around 100 views per day.
    3. Unizin: Indiana University’s Secret New “Learning Ecosystem” Coalition (May 2014) – This is the article where we broke the story about Unizin, based largely on a presentation at Colorado State University.

      4. (more…)

  • Kuali Student Sunsetting $40 million project, moving to KualiCo

    The changes with Kuali are accelerating, and there are some big updates on the strategy.

    Earlier this week the Kuali Foundation distributed an Information Update obtained by e-Literate on many of the details of the transition to Kuali 2.0 and the addition of the for-profit KualiCo. Some of the key clarifications:

    • KualiCo will be an independent C Corporation with a board of directors. KualiCo will not be a subsidiary of Kuali Foundation. Capital structure, equity allocations, and business plans are confidential and will not be shared publicly for the same reasons these things are rarely shared by private companies. The board of directors will start out with three members and will move to five or seven over time. Directors will include the CEO and an equal number of educational administrators and outside directors. One of the educational administrators will be appointed by the Kuali Foundation. Outside directors will be compensated with equity. Educational administrators will not be compensated in any way and could only serve as a director with the explicit permission of their university administration with attention to all relevant institutional policies.
    • KualiCo’s only initial equity investor is the Kuali Foundation. The Kuali Foundation will invest up to $2M from the Foundation’s cash reserves. [snip] For its equity investment, the Kuali Foundation will have the right to designate a director on the KualiCo Board of Directors. The Kuali Foundation, through its director, will have an exceptional veto right to block the sale of the company, an IPO of the company or a change to the open source license. This helps ensure that KualiCo will stay focused on marketplace-winning products and services rather than on flipping the company on Wall Street.
    • The Kuali Foundation is not licensing the Kuali software code for Kuali products to KualiCo as Kuali software is already fully open source and could be used by anyone for any purpose — as is already being done today. No license transfer or grant is needed by KualiCo or anyone else.
    • The copyright for the AGPL3 software will be copyright KualiCo for the open source distribution that is available to everyone. It would very quickly become untenable to even try to manage multiple copyright lines as various sections of code evolve through the natural enhancement processes of an open source community.

    (more…)

  • Kuali Foundation: Clarification on future proprietary code

    Well that was an interesting session at Educause as described at Inside Higher Ed:

    It took the Kuali leadership 20 minutes to address the elephant in the conference center meeting room.

    “Change is ugly, and change is difficult, and the only difference here is you’re going to see all the ugliness as we go through the change because we’re completely transparent,” said John F. (Barry) Walsh, a strategic adviser for the Kuali Foundation. “We’re not going to hide any difficulty that we run into. That’s the way we operate. It’s definitely a rich environment for people who want to chuck hand grenades. Hey, have a shot — we’re wide open.” [snip]

    Walsh, who has been dubbed the “father of Kuali,” issued that proclamation after a back-and-forth with higher education consultant Phil Hill, who during an early morning session asked the Kuali leadership to clarify which parts of the company’s software would remain open source.

    While the article describes the communication and pushback issues with Kuali’s creation of a for-profit entity quite well (go read the whole article), I think it’s worth digging into what Carl generously describes as a “back-and-forth”. What happened was that there was a slide describing the relicensing of Kuali code as AGPL, and the last bullet caught my attention: (more…)

  • Kuali For-Profit: Change is an indicator of bigger issues

    On Friday the Kuali Foundation announced the creation of a new for-profit entity to be led by the former CTO of Instructure, Joel Dehlin. Jeff Young at the Chronicle described the change:

    Ten years ago, a group of universities started a collaborative software project touted as an alternative to commercial software companies, which were criticized as too costly. On Friday the project’s leaders made a surprising announcement: that it would essentially become a commercial entity. [snip]

    The Kuali Foundation will continue to exist as a non-profit, but it will be an investor in a new commercial entity to back the Kuali software development. Leaders insisted that they would maintain the values of the project despite creating the kind of organization that they once criticized. For one thing, the source software will remain free and open, but the company will sell services, like software hosting. On Friday the group issued an FAQ with details about the change.

    As Carl Straumsheim put it at Inside Higher Ed:

    The Kuali Foundation, after a decade of fighting commercial software vendors as a community source initiative, will launch a commercial company to better fight… commercial software vendors.

    Despite the positioning that this change is about innovating into the next decade, there is much more to this change than might be apparent on the surface. The creation of a for-profit entity to “lead the development and ongoing support” and to enable “an additional path for investment to accelerate existing and create new Kuali products“ fundamentally moves Kuali away from the community source model. Member institutions will no longer have voting rights for Kuali projects but will instead be able to “sit on customer councils and will give feedback about design and priority”. Given such a transformative change to the underlying model, there are some big questions to address.

    Financial Needs

    Kuali, being a non-profit foundation, has its financial records available online, and the tax reporting form 990s are easily obtained through sites such as GuideStar. Furthermore, instructional media + magic (im+m) has a public eLibrary where they have shared Kuali documentation over the years. ((Disclosure: Jim Farmer from im+m has been a guest blogger at e-Literate for many years.)) There does not appear to be a smoking gun found in the financials to directly explain the need for such a significant change, but there are hints of issues that provide some insight. (more…)

  • Instructure’s CTO Joel Dehlin Abruptly Resigns

    One week after the conclusion of Instructure’s Users’ Conference, CTO Joel Dehlin abruptly resigned from the company for a new job. Joel took the CTO job with Instructure in summer 2013, around the same time as Devlin Daley’s departure (Devlin was co-founder). Joel’s resignation comes as a surprise, especially given his prominent placement as the technology lead for the Canvas LMS. As recently as InstructureCon on June 27th, Joel gave the product update presentation.

    The change became apparent by viewing the new Instructure leadership page (nice page design, btw), as I noticed that Joel was not included. I contacted Devin Knighton, Director of Public Relations for Instructure, who confirmed that the resignation was unexpected and was Joel’s decision. I am not sure how significant this resignation is for the company. What we do know is that Joel has not been replaced as CTO, but that Jared Stein (VP of Research and Education), Trey Bean (VP of Product), David Burggraaf (VP of Engineering), and Zach Willy (Chief Architect) will cover the CTO responsibilities in the near term. I would have more details, but Devin is on family vacation, and I did not want to push for him to send me an official email.

    We’ll keep you posted if we find out more information (assuming it is newsworthy).

    Update: Corrected second paragraph on VP of Product and VP of Engineering per Devin Knighton comment below.