e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Learning Platform

  • The Emerging Landscape of Educational Delivery Models

    Part 2 in this series, on a key difference in educational delivery methods, can be found here.

    Traditional education or online education. In the past decade it seems that the dominant conversation has been around the potential for online learning, both from for-profit and non-profit options, to disrupt education as an industry.

    What I believe we are seeing in 2011 and 2012 is a transition to an educational system no longer dominated by traditional education and one or two alternative models. As my colleague Molly Langstaff has described, educational technology and new educational courses and programs are interacting to create new language and models for education. What does this emerging landscape of educational delivery models look like?

    While I do not claim to be able to solve this problem, I would like to offer a more descriptive view than the dichotomy of traditional and online education describes.

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  • Guest Blog at WCET: Institutional Decision-Making and Changing LMS Market

    Today I had a guest post at WCET’s blog. WCET is a great organization that “accelerates the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education”. They have been leaders in sharing best practices for online education, including taking a leading role on explaining State Authorization regulations as well as others. You can read the full post here.

    The topic of the post is how the changing LMS / Learning Platform market is, or should be, changing institutional decision-making.

    We have seen a great deal of change in the higher education Learning Management System (LMS) market over the past year, as has been described in several blog posts. One of the biggest changes to the market that I’ve noticed is that we seem to be moving from an enterprise LMS market, with full-featured monolithic systems, into a learning platform market, with many cloud-based platforms that don’t attempt to have all the features in one system.

    As Ritchie Boyd has described, the WCET LMS Common Interest Group (CIG) is recasting itself this year as “the ‘Beyond the LMS’ Common Interest Group. The idea is to not ignore the LMS, but rather to acknowledge that there is so much more going on in the broader academic technology ecosystems and their impact on our campuses, and that much of this activity often includes or is enveloped by the formal LMS.”

    In last year’s WCET-sponsored Managing Online Education survey, 47% of respondents indicated they are reviewing their LMS strategy and 27% are planning to change LMS within 2 years. A key question arises, however, about how institutions should adapt their technology decision-making processes based on these market changes. It’s all well and good for the market to change and provide more choices and new approaches, but how should schools decide which system(s) best fit their specific academic and administrative needs? The emergence of new, often free, cloud-based learning platforms may require changes to our decision-making.

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  • Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

    Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

    What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

    The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

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  • Four Key Questions for the Apple Education Announcement

    There is growing buzz online about Apple’s planned media event on January 19th in New York City. Most speculation is focused on Apple distributing textbooks through iTunesU, as described in a New York Times blog. The basis for most speculation seems to be the short comments in the Walter Isaacson official biography of Steve Jobs. This information, along with some additional inside sources have led the NYT blogger Nick Wingfield to suggest that textbooks might be offered for free. In a post on Mashable, Kate Freeman suggests a partnership with publishers such as Pearson Education.

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