e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LoudCloud

  • Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education’s Predictive Analytics Deal With Unizin

    Barnes & Noble Education (BNED) announced today that they have a deal with Unizin to provide predictive analytics services through the LoudSight platform to the consortium’s member universities. As covered by Inside Higher Ed:

    BNED, as the company now likes to be called, operates nearly 1,500 bookstores, but has in recent years expanded beyond course materials. In March 2016, it acquired the software start-up LoudCloud, and it is through that company that BNED now will score a group of 22 potential new clients (or, in the cases where it already runs campus bookstores, form tighter connections with existing ones) that includes Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University and the State University System of Florida, among others.

    The deal represents a new product focus for BNED’s LoudCloud – predictive analytics – and a new financial model for Unizin. (more…)

  • Barnes & Noble Education Buys LMS Provider LoudCloud Systems For $17.9 Million

    Yesterday morning Barnes & Noble Education, the owner of 743 college bookstores and related services, announced the acquisition of LMS provider LoudCloud Systems for $17.9 million in cash. LoudCloud provides a traditional LMS for general higher education and K-12 needs, and they are best known for their customer Grand Canyon University, a for-profit provider and partial investor. LoudCloud from the beginning touted a modular approach to learning management systems, and one of their key modules is LoudBooks, an “adaptive and social” eReader of digital course materials. More recently, LoudCloud entered the competency-based education (CBE) market by releasing FASTRAK, an LMS specifically designed for CBE programs.

    According to LISTedTECH data, LoudCloud is used in a half dozen colleges and university accounts in the US, although these are mostly for-profits with multiple campuses.

    I have long heard discussions that LoudCloud was looking for an exit, so the acquisition of the company is not a surprise, per se. But why Barnes & Noble Education? I think that timing of the announcement helps answer that question.

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  • Editorial Policy: Notes on recent reviews of CBE learning platforms

    Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
    I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
    To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen
    They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed

    – R Plant, Kashmir

    Over the past half year or so I’ve provided more in-depth product reviews of several learning platforms than is typical – Helix, FlatWorld, LoudCloud, Bridge. Understanding that at e-Literate we are not a review site nor do we tend to analyze technology for technology’s sake, it’s worth asking ‘why the change?’. There has been a lot of worthwhile discussion in several blogs recently about whether the LMS is obsolete or critical to the future of higher ed, and this discussion even raised the subject of how we got to the current situation in the first place.

    An interesting development I’ve observed is that the learning environment of the future might already be emerging on its own, but not necessarily coming from the institution-wide LMS market. Canvas, for all its market-changing power, is almost a half decade old. The area of competency-based education (CBE), with its hundreds of pilot programs, appears to be generating a new generation of learning platforms that are designed around the learner (rather than the course) and around learning (or at least the proxy of competency frameworks). It seems useful to get a more direct look at these platforms to understand the future of the market and to understand that the next generation environment is not necessarily a concept yet to be designed.

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  • The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry

    For a few years starting in 2009, it seemed one of the best ways to raise VC funds or corporate internal investment was to say “we can beat Blackboard with a new cloud-based platform”. Witness Coursekit / Lore, Instructure / Canvas, OpenClass, LoudCloud Systems, Helix, and even more recently MOOC platforms. There were many articles written as these new systems entered the market, but what if we look back and ask whether the LMS market has actually changed recently? The picture that emerges is one of surprising resiliency by the established LMS providers.

    In fact, I would argue that in the past eight years (at least in North America) the only new system that has fully established itself in the LMS market is Canvas. Note that I have combined WebCT and ANGEL within the Blackboard umbrella, but even these systems established themselves more than a decade ago.

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  • Summary of Statements by Key Players in Blackboard Announcement, Including Competitors

    Given all the news and discussion surrounding Blackboard’s strategy change last week, I thought that it would be useful to collect the public statements from Blackboard and their competitors in one place. No analysis, no interviews, just statements. I have a feeling that this might provide a rich source of analysis 6 – 12 months from now.

    Blackboard Official Announcements

    On March 26th, Blackboard made four simultaneous announcements through press release. They also released two additional press releases based on these four announcements.

    Blackboard / Moodlerooms / NetSpot / Moodle / Severance Key Blogs and Interviews

    Subsequently, several of the key players in the Blackboard announcements made statements through their own blogs or through media interviews. (more…)

  • LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release

    One of the trends that I’ve been tracking in the LMS market is a move away from the monolithic, all-things-to-everyone enterprise LMS solution. There are several different approaches challenging this model, but the general theme is that the ed tech market needs more flexible, targeted approaches to directly support teaching and learning needs.

    The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article. In this announcement, LoudCloud promises what they describe as the “first fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management Systems for Higher Education and K12”. While I cannot judge yet how successful this vendor will be with their strategy, I think the announcement is significant for the LMS market for two reasons.

    • LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
    • The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery.

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  • Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS

    This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative, follow on Twitter  @PhilOnEdTech or his blog

    It’s been a busy week for LMS announcements, and I expect more announcements leading up to EDUCAUSE.  First, the Hawaii Virtual Learning Network (for K-12) is moving from Moodle to Blackboard, which as Michael Feldstein points out, is a new development to watch.  Then Brown University announced they are moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas as their LMS.  This morning, Jefferson County school district, the largest district in Colorado, announced that they have chosen a module from  LoudCloud Systems’ LMS as the basis for their Instructional Improvement System.

    That’s right – they purchased a module from the overall LMS.  Normally I cover higher ed more than K-12, but this announcement is worth watching since it shows how the New Mentality in LMS Market is or will be changing our expectations on what an LMS can provide.

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