e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: mobile

  • Mobile-first learning platform EmpoweredU acquired by Qualcomm

    Qualcomm, the giant $26 billion wireless technology conglomerate, acquired EmpoweredU – a mobile-first learning platform available for the education market. What does this acquisition mean?

    Who is EmpoweredU?

    The company was created by CEO Steve Poizner in 2011 in partnership with Creative Artists Agency, the world’s largest sports and talent agency, under the name “Encore Career Institute”. The initial work was to offer continuing ed classes targeted at Baby Boomers through the UCLA extension.  ((These are certificate programs for $5,000 – $10,000 total tuition.))  In essence, this was an Online Service Provider (OSP) model similar to Embanet, Deltak, Academic Partnerships and 2U. As described by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011:

    Poizner, in an interview at the firm’s headquarters this week, said the company combines “three of California’s greatest assets” – its famed public university system, the creative know-how of its technology center, Silicon Valley, and the cutting-edge marketing savvy of Hollywood. [snip]

    In addition to its employment potential for Baby Boomers, Poizner said, the collaboration could bring new revenue for cash-strapped UCLA and thousands of new students from around the nation to its online courses.

    The company changed names to Empowered Careers and then eventually settled on EmpoweredU.

    In the meantime they figured out that the OSP model is high risk and expensive, often requiring investments of $1 – $10 million per program by the OSP, with revenue-sharing profits occurring several years later. EmpoweredU has pivoted over the past year to become a mobile-first learning platform with content services.

    The platform is built on top of the Canvas open source version offered by Instructure and started pilots at 15+ schools this spring (including specific programs at USC, UC Berkeley, U of San Francisco, etc). This may be the most significant use of open source Canvas, and it might end up competing with Canvas, at least indirectly.

    As we’ll see later, EmpoweredU is also attempting to create a learning ecosystem that can combine multiple technologies.

    Why is Qualcomm making an ed tech acquisition?

    I interviewed Vicki Mealer (Senior Director, Business Development, Qualcomm Labs, which is the unit acquiring EmpoweredU) and Steve Poizner today. Vicki’s description of Qualcomm’s interest in ed tech is that they are all about mobile technology, and they have had a philanthropic interest in education for years (donating over $240 million cash to various institutions).  Qualcomm wants to be a behind-the-scenes cheerleader, but they also need an ecosystem for each market. Qualcomm Labs started looking at education a year ago, trying to identify and overcome barriers for adoption of mobile technology. Some of the perceived barriers: (more…)

  • New Internet Trends Presentation: Mary Meeker gets education partly right

    Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) has released her annual Internet Trends presentation, which has taken on a life of its own. Her data is very useful to see macro trends and the significance of Internet-related technology. Even in the non-education sections, the presentation should be very useful to education.

    One interesting perspective is that tablets continue their massive growth. Anecdotally, I am not seeing such a strong uptick in tablet usage by students on campuses, but the overall growth is worth exploring further. It would be interesting to see more longitudinal data specifically on tablet usage on campus.

    Tablet growth

    Another mobile perspective to keep watching is the rising percentage of web usage by mobile devices (smart phones and tablets), which jumped from 14% to 25% in just the past year. If your campus or technology company does not have a mobile strategy, then you are missing what students (and even faculty and staff) are actually experiencing on the web. (more…)

  • Blackboard Changes Underway: Jay Bhatt Interview and Management Changes

    There is an interesting article today from Bill Flook , who has covered Blackboard as a business, including the story of Michael Chasen’s departure in late 2012 along with two rounds of layoffs.

    Blackboard Inc. has been a company in transition long before CEO Michael Chasen announced his upcoming departure.

    In fact, the presence of Blackboard’s longtime chief has been its most visible constant. So the big question coming out of Monday’s news is this: What will the ed-tech behemoth look like, sans Chasen? [snip]

    If anything, it’s surprising that Chasen stayed on so long after the private equity buyout. He and Providence had “mutually sat down and worked out the right time frame for there to be a transition,” Chasen said in an interview Monday afternoon. “I’ve been here 15 years,” he said. “While I love Blackboard, and I think there is huge opportunity in front of us, I’ve been doing this since I was 25 years old and looking for there to be a good time for me to phase out.”

    Today we are starting to get more insight into the changes, based on Bill’s interview with Jay Bhatt, Blackboard’s new CEO, and coverage of management changes at the company.

    What hasn’t changed are the external pressures. Competitors in the core learning management system (LMS) market like Instructure and Desire2Learn are eating into Blackboard’s once-dominant market share. Open source is challenging the traditional licensed software model, just as mobile and cloud-based services challenge native desktop software. Blackboard is an internationally recognizable brand, with a broad array of products and a powerful private equity player behind it. It is, however, still seen as the legacy player.

    In his first in-depth interview since joining Blackboard, Bhatt laid out his vision for navigating those challenges. And with less than half a year in the role, he’s marked off two key areas of investment: the online program management market, and international.

    Bhatt emphasized the need to grow top-line revenue.

    Bhatt was equally emphatic about what his mission at Blackboard isn’t.

    “Make no mistake, our goal is to be a top-line growth company,” he said. “Obviously, we want to be profitable, and we want to generate the returns that our investors want. But we need to grow the top line. Software companies that grow the top line effectively are really adding value to their industry, they’re not just monetizing their industry.”

    According to the article, there have been some significant management changes at Blackboard as well. Tim Hill (president of global marketing), Siegfried Behrens (president of global sales, recently hired from Microsoft) and David Mills (VP of R&D, formerly of ANGEL and MoodleRooms, key visionary behind xpLor) have all left the company in the past two weeks. Kayvon Beykpour (general manager of Blackboard Mobile and co-founder of TerriblyClever) is also on a leave of absence. Matthew Small has been promoted to president of international, and Jim Kelly from McGraw-Hill has been hired as VP of business development.

    Bill indicates that he will have more information and insight on Blackboard’s future direction coming out soon. Read the whole article here.

  • Mobile in Ed Tech: Moving Beyond Browser Replacement

    In 2003 Steve Jobs made a speech to the International Design Conference in Aspen, and the audio for this speech has just been re-discovered and shared. There is even a transcription from the Verge available here. During his talk, Jobs foresaw future mobile devices as well as the challenge we would face in truly taking advantage of these mobile devices.

    Ok let’s go back to this revolution, what is happening? What’s happening is the personal computer is a medium– of communication. One of the medium. So what’s a medium? It’s a technology communication. A book is a medium. Telephone. Radio. Television. These are mediums of communication. And each medium has pitfalls to it, it has shortcomings, has boundaries which you can’t cross. But it also, generally, has some new unique opportunities.

    The neat thing, is that each medium shapes not only the communication that goes through it but it shapes the process of the communication. Perfect example: if you compare the telephone with what we’re seeing if you link a bunch of computers together and we can send messages to an electronic mailbox, which people can then receive– at their leisure.

    (more…)

  • Desire2Learn Mobile Contest Winners

    I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while. Way back in July, I had the privilege to be a judge in Desire2Learn’s Edge Challenge. Basically, they offered cash prizes for groups building compelling mobile applications for education. One of the nice aspects of the contest was that the apps didn’t have to have anything to do with D2L’s technologies (although use of those technologies was, of course, encouraged). Basically, if it was new and innovative and good for students and teachers, then it didn’t matter what technology was used. As a judge, I both evaluated the entrants and then—the fun part—got to participate in a coaching session with the winners.

    The two companies that made it to the coaching session were both really interesting. The first, mPrep, delivers lessons and quizzes to K12 students in Kenya via text messages on mobile phones (whether they are smartphones or not). There is also an analytics portal for teachers. The company has aspirations to expand its reach across Africa and, eventually, to the rest of the developing world. Here’s their video entry:

    The second was a company called Primal. They have a semantic search technology that helps you zero in on what you were actually looking for by understanding your interests. They built an app on top of their core technology called Learning Sherpa. Basically, the tool combines the class context of what is being taught (e.g., anatomy and physiology) with the student’s interests (e.g., baseball and statistics) to find articles that cover both areas. In other words, it helps students find their zone of proximal curiosity in the context of the class.  Here’s their video entry:

    Great stuff. Both of these start-ups impressed me a great deal. I think D2L’s contest was outstanding and I hope they do it again.