e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Learning platforms

  • The Billion Dollar EdTech Platform Hole

    Actually, make those plural: billions, holes…

    In my last post I began to frame a multi-part discussion about the state of play of #edtech and how response to the global pandemic will result in a significant acceleration of what has been a relatively long and drawn out adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning. And, while it seems an obvious statement – in light of the extraordinary increase in, say, use of technology-enabled grocery delivery – my point is that many of the specific objections and barriers that persisted are moot in the face of the alternative (insolvency of the institution). As those issues are reconciled, it is clear that a key driver is the (re?)realization that organizing around the needs of learners is job one.

    Let’s start with a quick historical take on the various players in the education ecosystem and their assertions about how technology, platforms and data would transform the education landscape. I will speak in broad brush generalities and to protect the innocent and guilty I will not use names of companies, institutions or individuals.

    Some quick, level-setting definitions for purposes of this post (obviously leaving some categories out at this point of the series):

    Publishers – large and small purveyors of products including textbooks and online courseware systems that are based on a specific author’s (or team of authors’) content, pedagogy and reputation.

    Institutions – including higher education state systems, for-profits and consortia

    LMS providers – commercial and not-for-profit providers of learning management systems (LMS) / virtual learning environments (VLEs) and course management systems (CMS)

    Point Solution providers – defined as offerings typically designed to solve on specific business problem. Due to this specialization and focus, point solutions are champions in their specific area of functionality.

    Going back more than twenty years, we saw the first portals and LMS companies enter the market. Most of the positioning related to efficiencies like “get out of line and get on line” – for example, providing online access to registrar and bursar functions, anytime access to course materials like syllabi and handouts, and even rudimentary online office hours. For the institutions, the LMS promised to give students an anytime, anywhere access point to their courses and ideally for the institution to have another vehicle for collecting data. But it was hard work!  The teaching faculty were mostly left to their own devices to set these courses up; it took well more than a decade for 50% of US college courses to have an instance in their local LMS that presented much more than a file download of their syllabus.

    Publishers, on the other hand, used technology to create marketing splash and develop bundles intended to preserve the demand and value of the underlying print product. What started as CD-ROMS in the back of books became online access to supplemental course content and eventually to auto-graded online homework systems (a huge time-savings benefit to teaching faculty, especially in quantitative disciplines). As I mentioned in my last post, these systems typically comprise a fraction of the overall course experience. It is also evident that not all disciplines could be supported effectively by the auto-graded homework systems.

    Point solutions providers invariably entered the market chasing whatever cycle of buzzword-worthy solution development was in vogue: e-portfolios, lecture capture, e-books (42 at the peak, including “fit for learning” tablets), and adaptive learning platforms to name a few. As my definition indicates, these typically solved for a specific value proposition and many championed big ideas for the market broadly. Many failed along the way, a smaller number operate independently today as small companies, while a surprising number were acquired and bundled into the LMS and Publisher portfolios.

    Meanwhile, Institutions have been developing their own technologies as well. Partnering with other institutions to build LMS as well as creating point solutions like clickers, e-book readers and adaptive systems.

    And along the way, each of these organizations staked their claims to the nature of the market:

    • “the cable television network of education”
    • “the EBay of education”
    • “the consortium that will flip the textbook market on its head”
    • “the Amazon of education”

    You get the idea.

    It’s in that incomplete, but sufficient context, that I want to make my case. It takes millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, to build, maintain and evolve education technology platforms. Across the landscape there are dozens and dozens of organizations that have made investments at that order of magnitude. In some instances, organizations built and acquired more than one. That adds up to billions of dollars.

    And yet, the learner journey and experience remains very disjointed in today’s reality. In the spirit of academic freedom, an overwhelming majority of individual teaching faculty curate the materials and tools for their courses. And since it is the very rare case for a single provider to deliver an end-to-end experience – it is rather common for students to be required to navigate multiple, disparate systems, jump through multiple authentication sequences, and experience jarring differences in user experience and content fidelity. Beyond the challenges of the interactive experience, this form of curation can also complicate topics like affordability and equity of access for diverse student audiences.

    In the background, industry technology interoperability standards have evolved tremendously but are implemented in asymmetrical, unpredictable and sometimes proprietary ways. The use of instructional designers by institutions is growing, but there are still only 10,000 or so individual practitioners or roughly 1 per 100 teaching faculty members. These and other efforts can help, but are really band-aids covering bigger issues.

    Billions of dollars spent to develop products that are still hard to use because of massive market inefficiencies, competitive dynamics and other challenges in the broader education ecosystem.

    And here we are, the great acceleration. Yes, adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning is and will accelerate further. But the question is how higher education institutions and the companies that serve them will react to preserve (or not) academic freedom. Certainly, there is a bi-furcation within the market and even within institutions for more top-down course design and development – but a significant percentage of the overall enrolments are based in institutions with far more complex academic freedom cultures and governance models.

    I think this bi-furcation will widen. More and more courses will be built to “scale” with super clean instructional design, careful consideration of student engagement models, insightful use of data to drive outcomes, and “hands on” training for instructors who will deliver using best practices, their own skills and experiences, but little academic freedom.

    On the other hand, institutions for which academic freedom is a key tenet in their institutional mission will strive to build the capacities necessary to preserve their brands and the uniqueness of their teaching culture, while delivering high quality, differentiated learner experiences in technology-enabled environments. For these institutions, two things will become paramount: 1) changes to tenure and promotion incentives and 2) providing the time and resources (including outsourced services) to help faculty develop great courses.

    And those are not the only big changes looming: those institutions will become far more demanding of the companies seeking to provide them with content, technologies and services to ensure those offerings are not locked into proprietary platforms and business models. As they don’t say in politics, it’s about the learner experience, stupid!

    Next Up: The Netflix of Education, part ad nauseum

  • Follow-Up From Future Trends Forum Discussion On Learning Platforms

    Follow-Up From Future Trends Forum Discussion On Learning Platforms

    Last Thursday I participated in a Future Trends Forum, hosted on the Shindig platform, with host Bryan Alexander on the topic of “What’s next with the LMS?”. I have to admit this was one of the best virtual discussions I’ve had, and more than half of the session was driven by audience questions. You can check out the Twitter discussion, Storified , or listen to an audio recording of the whole session, thanks to Roxanne Riskin. Update: See YouTube video of event posted at end.

    As Bryan described in his blog post:

    Yet maybe the conversation won’t stop there, at 3:05 pm EDT on June 29th. Because when we broke we had more than thirty (!) unanswered questions remaining from the Forum community. I’d like to share those now, so that Phil can respond, but also so that anyone can dive in, whether or not you participated yesterday.

    I don’t have enough time to address all the of the questions, but I would like to tackle a few. We’re also talking about having a part 2 and bringing in Michael in late August. In the meantime . . .

    • Competitiveness – Is the lack of competitiveness due to a lack of innovation or because IT decision makers are looking for consistency/ease of support?

    This question refers to the point I made in this blog post that in four global regions we have two companies dominating the installed base (Moodle, Blackboard), one dominating new implementations (Canvas) with one gaining recent momentum (D2L Brightspace). That’s four solutions dominating across the globe for higher education, hence the “lack of competitiveness” in the question.

    While I think the market needs more innovation, I don’t think that’s the primary cause of this emerging four-way oligopoly. One issue more important than pure innovation is that ed tech is a difficult market in terms of scaling a business, and it is difficult to remain profitable. Canvas is growing fastest, and Instructure (parent company) plans to be cash-flow positive in 2018. As in, Instructure is not profitable yet. Just two years ago Moody’s changed their outlook on Blackboard to negative due to very high debt to EBITDA ratios and “stagnating revenues”.  We have little public information on D2L, but I have pointed out company layoffs occurring after the large investment rounds. Moodle is open source and not directly a system with profits. This comes at a time when the expectations for competitive LMS offerings is rising in terms of cloud hosting and interoperability and intuitive user experience. This is not an easy business.

    • What are your thoughts about competency-based education (CBE)? In particular, with Elliucian leaving the space, do you see a market for a CBE-targeted LMS? And, which products do you see as leaders? or potential leaders?
    • CBE – You’ve brought up CBE a few times. Do you feel there is slower than expected growth for colleges/univ for CBE. Hence, the sun setting of Ellucian’s platform. Or, perhaps, are they force fitting the current LMS to be their CBE LMS?

    See this post describing the very slow growth of CBE platforms. If you think the institutional LMS market is difficult, try the CBE platform market. We do not have the same level of market data for CBE as we do for LMS, but anecdotally I believe that Sagence Learning (formerly FlatWorld) has won the greatest number of CBEN platform selections in the past year or two.

    • Have you seen any trends in terms of schools with more than one LMS – are places consolidating or fracturing? (always surprised by number of institutions that have more than one)

    There is a general, low-level trend in higher education to have fewer cases of secondary LMS usage. Mostly consolidating while aiming to increase the number of third-party apps working alongside the primary system.

    • hosted vs. not hosted – For those LMSs that aren’t open source, do you have any thoughts on how institutions are managing systems – are they choosing to host themselves or are they choosing to use vendor hosting (or other options)?

    In all four global regions we have covered (North America, Europe, Latin America, Oceania), there is a move towards managed and cloud hosting and away from self-hosting. In North America, more than 90% of new LMS selections are going straight to managed or cloud hosting. Europe trends the same direction but is roughly 50 / 50 for new implementations. And I should point out that these trends exist for open source solutions – maybe not to the same level, but in the same direction.

    • K-12 – following up on Schoology and google classroom, what force is K-12 going to be in the future of higher ed LMS? can the teaching energy and innovation of K-12 energize higher ed teaching…?

    I have written several posts on Google Classroom, although I need to do an update. The general answer is that neither Google Classroom or Facebook Classroom show significant signs of affecting the higher ed market. There is some interest in both platforms, but mostly from a small number of individual faculty. And neither platform is designed to solve the gradebook or system integration needs of higher ed. Yet.

    We have several posts on Schoology, which has a bigger potential impact on higher ed for a K-12 based system.

    • Finally, we partially discussed a set of question from Fred Beshears, summarized in this new post. The general topic is around CBE platforms and whether LMS systems are moving to support “massive student information profiles” (across courses for large numbers of students) or whether this is being relegated to student record systems. We partially address these questions in the Future Trends Forum, but not entirely. Hopefully we’ll see others jumping into the online discussion. Update: See discussion thread at Bryan’s post for discussion on this topic.
    • (Update: Finally, finally) I answered two questions in the session about the potential of the LMS as an integration hub, bringing in third-party apps rather than being monolithic systems. The answers were admittedly aspirational. George Station made a good point on Twitter that there is another side to the LMS impact on pedagogy:

    I do agree that this has happened, as covered further in replies to that tweet.

  • Social Learning Tools Are Fine, But Not Critical For All Educational Models

    We are in a high point of investment and interest in the application of technology to innovate education, and a lot of attention has been paid to the new class of learning platforms that have social tools at the center of the platform design – think Instructure, Coursekit, OpenClass, etc. I have written about several new solutions and how they could disrupt our traditional LMS markets. However, the discussions about the potential of different learning platforms too often ignore some key differences in the models of education that are the targets for educational technology. One result is that some systems are often dismissed out of hand for not having any real social or collaboration tools – think the new iTunesU app or Khan Academy.

    There is a big divide, in my opinion, between the application of technology to support and improve traditional models of education and the application of technology to create or enable new models of education. Whether social and collaboration features are critical depends on the educational model, not on the technology available.

    Improving Traditional Education

    In this case, the role of educational technology is to bring the benefits of technical features of social, mobile, big data, consumerization, etc to the classroom model that has existed for hundreds of years. The obvious example is bringing learning platforms and other tools to improve how well students learn in a classroom setting. I would include in this model the goals of the flipped classroom as well as online courses designed by individual faculty members. In all these cases, the usage of technology is to reduce the administrative burden, make the best usage of classroom time, and supporting pedagogical designs of the class. The technology replicates – hopefully in a compelling manner – the traditional role of tranmitting information, cohort-based learning and interaction, self-assessment such as quizzes, and official assessments such as tests and grading.

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